LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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PROVERBS FROM 
PLYMOUTH PULPIT 



SELECTED FROM THE WRITINGS AND SAYINGS OF 

HENRY WARD BEECHER 



\ 

BY 

WILLIAM DRYSDALE 



REVISED IN PART BY MR. BEECHER, AND UNDER REVISION 
BY HIM AT THE TIME OF HIS DEATH 




NEW YORK 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
1887 



Copyright, 1887, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



INTRODUCTION. 



The characteristic sayings by the Rev. Henry 
Ward Beecher contained in this volume are se- 
lected from the sermons, speeches, and writings 
of the pastor of Plymouth Church. 

The work was begun nearly ten years ago, at 
Mr. Beecher's suggestion and under his guid- 
ance. After its completion the manuscript was 
in his hands, and he from time to time revised 
and corrected it. When his ministry came to a 
glorious close, he had gone patiently over about 
one third of it, making many alterations, addi- 
tions, and erasures. The remaining proverbs 
stand in the words in which Mr. Beecher ori- 
ginally clothed them. 

The labor of making these selections from 
the many volumes of Mr. Beecher's works was 
greatly lightened to me by assistance from Mr. 
Beecher himself, and from one who preceded 
him by several years on the great journey, the 
Rev. Walter S. Drysdale. 

William Drysdale. 

New York, April, 1887. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Nature 7 

Man 12 

Manhood , . . 27 

The Human Mind 31 

Business 39 

Character 46 

The World 51 

Success . 55 

Human Life . , 57 

Political 62 

Liberty 71 

Wealth 72 

The Poor 78 

The Press 79 

Education 81 

Amusements . . .83 

The Family 85 

Children 94 

Morals 98 

Truth 105 

Taste 107 

Benevolence 109 

Religion .117 



6 Contents. 

PAGE 

Theology 132 

The Bible 134 

Nature of God 141 

Christ 152 

The Spirit of God ......... 158 

Christianity 162 

Christian Life 164 

Wickedness 194 

The Church 199 

Love * 207 

Trouble 212 

Temptation 220 

Death 222 

Persons and Systems 223 

Miscellaneous 226 



PROVERBS 
FROM PLYMOUTH PULPIT. 



NATURE. 

At the bottom of every leaf-stem is a cradle, and in 
it is an infant germ ; the winds will rock it, the birds 
will sing to it all summer long, but the next season it 
will unfold and go alone. 

The births of God Almighty are births of weakness. 
Everything in the universe comes to its perfection by 
drill and marching — the seed, the insect, the animal, the 
man, the spiritual man. 

The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the 
day. It is a blessed baptism which gives the first wak- 
ing thoughts into the bosom of God. 

No cradle for an emperor's child was ever prepared 
with so much magnificence as this world has been for 
man. But it is only his cradle. 

Nature would be scarcely worth a puff of the empty 
wind if it were not that all Nature is but a temple, of 
which God is the brightness and the glory. 

The more important an animal is to be, the lower is 
its start. Man, the noblest of all, is born lowest. 



8 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 



The wide pasture is but separate spears of grass ; the 
sheeted bloom of the prairies but isolated flowers. How- 
ever small, that can not be insignificant individually with- 
out which greatness would not be great, nor beautifulness 
beautiful. 

Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made, 
and forgot to put a soul into. 

The higher up in Nature we go, the more things end- 
lessly branch and diversify. Perfectness demands diver- 
sity, and not similarity. 

Flowers are sent to do God's work in unrevealed 
paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly 
suspect. 

Flowers may beckon toward us, but they speak toward 
heaven and God. 

The monkey is an organized sarcasm upon the human 
race, with variations multitudinous. 

The dog was created specially for children. He is a 
god of frolic. 

Leaves die, but trees do not. They only undress. 

If a man that loves flowers, and loves them enough 
to labor for them, is not to be trusted, where in this 
wicked world shall we go for trust ? 

Every farm should own a good farmer. 

The greatest event in a hen's life is made up of an 
egg and a cackle. But eagles never cackle. 

Of all man's works of art, a cathedral is greatest. A 
vast and majestic tree is greater than that. 



Nature. 



9 



The best stock a man can invest in is the stock of a 
farm ; the best shares are plowshares. 

The apple-tree is tough as an Indian, patient as an 
ox, and fruitful as the Jewish Rachael. 

Small farming is often the largest. 

Nature can work roughly and coarsely in generalities, 
but she wants man's intellect and will to interpret what 
she does. 

God has quilted the earth with beauty, and combed 
the hair of millions of mosses, reeds, and grasses, and 
every day fills them with jewels, and yet nothing is fop- 
pish or garish ! 

A wild rose, a prairie rose, or a sweet-brier, is a floral 
nightingale whose song is perfume. 

What a great heart an apple-tree must have ! What 
generous work it makes of blossoming ! The tree is but 
a huge bouquet. The field only has a bosom large 
enough to wear it ! 

A flower is the point of transition at which a material 
thing touches the immaterial ; it is the sentient vegetable 
soul. We ascribe dispositions to it. 

Some have supposed that the mosquito is of a devout 
turn, and never will partake of a meal without first say- 
ing grace. The devotions of some men are but a preface 
to blood-sucking. 

A cow is the saint of the barn-yard. She could be 
fat if she would only be selfish. But she economizes 
beauty that she may be profuse in milk. 



io Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

A man who sees in Nature nothing but materiality, is 
no more an artist than he is a musician who, in one of 
Beethoven's symphonies, hears only noise. 

Every summer has its own portrait and individual- 
ism. Every year is a divine composition — a multitudi- 
nous picture. God never copies his own pictures, or 
repeats them. 

Rain ! whose soft architectural hands have power to 
cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very 
mountains, as no artist could ever do ! 

Maple-trees are the cows of trees (spring-milked), 
plain, good, useful, but not adorable. 

There is a distinct joy in owning land, unlike that 
which you have in money, in houses, in books, pictures, 
or anything else which men have devised. You wed the 
land, and it brings forth innumerable children. 

No city-bred man has any business to expect satis- 
faction in a pure country life for two months, unless he 
has a genius for leisure and even laziness. 

Some days seem to be characterized by some single 
sense. There are head-days, heart-days ; there are eye- 
days and ear-days ; in each of which distinctive sensations 
of pleasure predominate. No man can be happy in every 
part of himself at one and the same time. 

Never did a summer storm pass that did not smite 
on the storehouse of autumn, and cause it to open its 
doors, and bring forth of its abundant treasures. 

October is the opal month of the year. It is the 
month of glory, of ripeness. It is the picture-month. 



Nature. 



1 1 



The hills wait for us in the morning, with their sides 
draped with mist-lace, wrought in mighty convolutions 
and patterns, such as royalty could never command from 
Mechlin or Valenciennes. 

No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were 
gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make 
magnificent colonnades along its streets. 

The elms of New England ! They are as much a 
part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon 
were the glory of its architecture. 

October is Nature's funeral month. Nature glories 
in death more than in life. The month of departure 
is more beautiful than the month of coming — October 
than May. Every green thing loves to die in bright 
colors. 

That is nature which we come to by culture, not that 
which we come to before we are unfolded. It is absurd 
to look for nature in youth, or in barbarism. Nature is 
to be looked for in civilization and right manhood. 

Men like Rochefoucauld represent human nature very 
much as if a man should undertake to represent the 
rivers of our country by analyzing the common sewers 
of New York. There is far more of goodness among 
men than of evil. There is far more of happiness than 
of misery. But one shriek has more effect upon the 
nerves than a whole day long of quiet smiles. 

God clothes the flowers of the field, we are told, but 
he pushes babes into life naked. Learning how to make 
their clothes, for the inside and for the out, is the busi- 
ness of a man in this world. 



12 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



MAN. 

A man in ripe age is like a sword in a shop-window. 
Men that look upon the perfect blade do not imagine 
the process by which it was completed. 

There is always need for a man to go higher, if he 
has the capacity to go. 

A man ought to carry himself in the world as an 
orange-tree would, if it could walk up and down in the 
garden — swinging perfume from every little censer it 
holds up to the air. 

It takes longer for man to find out man than any 
other creature that is made. 

The strength of a man consists in finding out the 
way in which God is going, and going in that way too. 

The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our pas- 
sions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our 
moral nature. They should be to spiritual sentiments 
what the hot-bed is to early flowers. 

Man with his faculties is like a band of music. Here 
is your trombone, here are your flutes, the cornet, and 
the French horns. It requires long drill for each instru- 
ment. It is the very business of life to teach men the 
use of their several parts, and the harmony of the whole. 

No man who has not waded through history, who 
has not sounded the depth of blood, can have any con- 
ception of the lowness and diminutiveness of man. Eng- 
lish literature is bitter, down to the time of Cowper, with 
contempt of the vulgar herd. 



Man. 



13 



In the morning, we carry the world like Atlas ; at 
noon, we stoop and bend beneath it ; and at night, it 
crushes us flat to the ground. 

Every man carries a menagerie in himself; and, by 
stirring him up all around, you will find every sort of 
animal represented there. 

To be full of goodness, full of cheerfulness, full of 
sympathy, full of helpful hope, causes a man to carry 
blessings of which he is himself as unconscious as a 
lamp of its own shining. Unconscious goodness is the 
perfume of the soul in blossom. 

Man is God's. Everything else is the nursery and 
nurse of man. 

If a man is fit to go higher, he will show it by being 
faithful where he is. 

A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never 
thinks that he gets as much as he deserves. 

Christ's lament over Jerusalem is the key-note to the 
whole love and symphony of God toward wicked men, as 
represented in the New Testament. 

In the destruction of a man there is more than in 
the whelming of an empire, because it is forever, forever, 
forever ! 

The most difficult people to manage are the men who 
never see anything in a jest ; who never relax a feature ; 
who never develop a smile ; who never indulge in humor. 
They are rocky men, on whom no moss will grow. They 
are harsh men who carry gashing angles to the end of 
life. 

2 



14 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

No man can be charitable toward all men who does 
not start with the belief that men are weak and temptable 
in all parts of their nature. If you do not expect excel- 
lence, you will be less disappointed at missing it. 

We have no right to treat a man as if he were a 
beast because he has acted like a beast. 

A man without ambition is worse than dough that 
has no yeast in it to raise it. 

Men never grow up into manhood as an acorn grows 
into an oak-tree. Men come to it by re-births in every 
faculty, again, and again, and again. 

The highest manhood resides in disposition, not in 
mere intellect. 

Man is the omnium gatherum of all vexatious insects 
in the world. He is the only universal tease. A man 
that can bear cheerfully his fellow-men has little to 
learn. 

There is true nobility in England. God makes gen- 
uine lords — not the king, nor the constitution. 

There is nothing that makes men rich and strong but 
that which they carry inside of them. 

There are some men whose nerves seem not to have 
been covered up. They lie out to the weather. 

There is many a Waterloo fought in the soul of a 
man, without historian to record it. 

The eye is a daguerreotype plate. It is set to re- 
ceive pictures, not to compose or paint them. The art of 
seeing well is not to think about seeing. 



Man. 



15 



The tongue of a man may be the silver bell of the 
soul, or the iron and crashing hammer of the anvil. 

True aiming in life is like true aiming in marksman- 
ship. We always look at the fore-sight of a rifle through 
the hind-sight — sagacity is the fore-sight and experience 
the hind-sight. 

Every man is made up, as it were, of many men. 
We are populous. All our faculties and tendencies may 
be considered as separate personalties ; and that which 
is of the earth, earthy, is made to suffer, in order that 
that which is of the heavens, heavenly, may rise into 
ascendency and power. 

Nothing is orderly till man takes hold of it. Every- 
thing in creation lies around loose, or is mixed up in the 
most inextricable disorder. Men make science. God 
made only the materials. 

Men need mixing. Lawyers ought not to consort 
only with lawyers. Soldiers should seek civil society. 
We need our complement and counterpart to fill out 
deficiency. 

It is not what a man finds that does him good, but 
what he does. 

A man is a great bundle of tools. He is born into 
this life without the knowledge of how to use them. 
Education is the process of learning their use, and dan- 
gers and troubles are God's whetstones with which to 
keep them sharp. 

No creature that God made on the earth has so little 
liberty to do as he pleases as man, unless he pleases to 
obey natural laws. 



1 6 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



You must put your hand into a man's heart to find 
out how much he is worth, not into his pocket. 

A man is safe just in proportion as you develop the 
whole of him, and dangerous in proportion as you per- 
mit him to be little. The more you develop man the 
safer he grows. Virtuous intelligence is national insur- 
ance. 

Man is to be thoroughly enlarged, thoroughly em- 
powered by development, and then thoroughly trusted. 

A man who does not love praise is not a full man. 

A man without ambition is like a beautiful worm — it 
can creep, but it can not fly. 

Proud and lazy men are like old hulks that make no 
voyage, and leak at every seam. 

You never know till you try to reach them how ac- 
cessible men are ; but you. must approach each man by 
the right door. 

Godwill never receive us upon any invoice sent from 
this world. Every man is to be unpacked, examined, 
and reappraised. 

Of all miserable men, they are the most miserable 
who have been educated intellectually, who have fine 
tastes and strong emotive powers, but no sort of ability 
to get along when obliged to shift for themselves. The 
ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward 
success. 

There is an equator that runs just under the nose : 
all that live below the equator are animals ; all that live 
above it are men. 



Man. 



17 



Every man should build himself up in such manhood, 
strength, and beauty, that other men will say, " Show me 
the path that he has trod." 

It is part and parcel of every man's life to develop 
beauty in himself. All perfect things have in them an 
element of beauty. 

No one has ever seen the man that is in man ; still 
less the man himself. 

All the wide world is but the husbandry of God for 
the development of the one fruit — man. 

Man is God's courier through time and eternity, and 
nothing that concerns him can be considered as little. 

Many men use their ears as a bolting-cloth, only to 
catch the bran and let the flour go. 

Sharp men, like sharp needles, break easy, though 
they pierce quick. 

The worst thing a human being can do is to bring 
down his standard. Better throw the compass overboard, 
and let winds and currents do the steering. 

Society owes a man whatever he has earned — only 
that and nothing more. 

Uncertainty, with fear, is hell. 

No man owns anything until it has been converted 
into to-day. To-morrow we have no business with. 
We steal if we touch to-morrow. It is God's. 

God makes every man happy who knows how to 
play upon himself. Every man is full of music ; but 
it is not every man that knows how to bring it out. 



1 8 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

No man has a right to go beyond a certain amount 
of brain-expenditure. 

We may use the interest but not the capital of excit- 
ability. 

Man is at the bottom an animal, midway a citizen, 
and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is 
such that few ripen at the top. 

Some vulgar men are like a frog that sits on the edge 
of a morass, and croaks one note, one note, one note, 
and whose life consists in plumping into the mud, and 
getting out again, and croaking, croaking ! 

God made men to live upon pleasurable excitement. 
There is not a faculty in the human soul that is not 
made to have the inspiration of pleasure in it. 

The wise man, who is neither parsimonious nor pro- 
fuse, steers a middle course of generous economy and 
frugal liberality. 

The moment a man loses his stomach, the citadel of 
his life is taken. 

A man must ask leave of his stomach to be a happy 
man. 

Sanguine men ruin themselves to enrich the com- 
munity. Schemers and speculators open up new ways, 
develop inventions, and, though they themselves perish, 
the slow and cautious men who come after grow rich 
by their labors, while they ridicule their memory. Thus 
the analogy with Nature is complete. It is the dying 
leaves and grass of last summer that furnish the food for 
the living grass of this summer. 



Man. 



l 9 



A young man used hardly and roughly will be a 
tougher man in the end. He will go into the fire iron 
and come out steel. 

Mankind are yet to be enfranchised. Intelligence, 
virtue, moral sentiment, inspired by the spirit of God, are 
going to prevail. God is abroad upon that work. 

The mere wit is only a human bauble. He is to life 
what bells are to horses — not expected to draw the load, 
but only to jingle while the horses draw. 

Our thoughts, our tastes, our emotions, our partiali- 
ties, our prejudices, and finally our conduct and habits, 
are insensibly changed by the influence of men who 
never once directly tempted us, or even knew the effect 
which they produced. 

Man needs to intensify his abhorrence of the beast 
that is in man — the belluine appetites, the passions which 
are destructive to peace and happiness. 

God has made sleep to be a sponge by which to rub 
out fatigue. A man's roots are planted in night as in a 
soil. Life is a plant that grows out of death. 

Some men are in regard to ridicule like metal-roofed 
buildings : the hail that hits them bounds rattling off — 
not a stone goes through. 

The power of hiding ourselves from one another is 
mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would de- 
vour one another but for this protection. 

A sick soul finds medicine in company, but for a 
poisoned heart there is nothing in the world so poison- 
ous as men. 



20 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

A tongue that is the chimney of the lower nature is 
full of soot and blackness. 

Clothes and manners do not make the man; but, 
when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance. 

Where the human race was an acid race when Christ 
found them, they are now, comparatively speaking, a 
sugar race. 

He who strikes his fellow-man, when poor, and weak, 
and helpless, buffets his Saviour ; and he who crowns 
his fellow-man, crowns his Saviour. 

Man hitherto has been strongest in his capacity of 
hating. Christ sought to change the point of supreme 
power to love. 

Some men move through life as a band of music 
moves down the street, flinging out pleasure on every 
side through the air, to every one, far and near, that can 
listen ; others fill the air with harsh clang and clangor. 
Many men go through life carrying their tongue, their 
temper, their whole disposition, so that, wherever they 
go, others dread them. 

All men have to avoid thistles ; but the thistle never 
avoids any that it can scratch. Many men are thistle- 
like in scratching others. 

When God made man, he made more of nature in 
him than he did in all the rest of the world besides. 
Man is nature, the rest of creation is but wood and 
leaves. 

None love to speak so much, when the mood of 
speaking comes, as they who are naturally taciturn. 



Man. 



21 



In engineering, that only is great which achieves. It 
matters not what the intention is, he who in the day of 
battle is not victorious is not saved by his intention. 

Men need brotherhood and sympathy as much as 
they need the loaf. The soul is often hungrier than the 
body, and no shops can sell it food. 

There is no man on earth that you can afford to treat 
otherwise than kingly. 

Few men try all their faculties ; most men are like 
gunboats, carrying a single heavy gun, with which they 
do most of their fighting, the rest being done with small- 
arms. 

The strong are God's natural protectors of the weak. 

There is so much that is deaf and dumb in man, and 
so much that is paralyzed, so much that is shrunken, that 
nothing short of a miraculous touch of re-creation can 
make them at death perfect beings. 

The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes. Ig- 
norance is the womb of monsters. 

Man makes all natural laws serve him, and rides 
them. They are his bow, by which he projects the 
golden arrow of success. 

The best lessons a man ever learns are from his mis- 
takes. It is not for want of schoolmasters that we are 
still ignorant. 

There are few misers ; but there are a great many 
men who have the elements of miserism in them, and 
need only time and opportunity. 



22 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 



There never was a man with a big brain, except 
Christ, who was not despotic somewhere. 

There is nothing in life for most men but what they 
work out with their hands, fertilized by their brains. 

A man may be self-indulgent in books as well as in 
wine and pleasure. A man may be a glutton of knowl- 
edge as well as of food. 

Unless a man has an aim, his life is like a harness, all 
the parts of which have been unbuckled from their fel- 
lows, and which are so many separate straps heaped up 
in a room. Unless they be put together and placed on 
the horse, he can not draw. 

In this country a man who knows how to save will 
just as surely be well off before he dies, if he does not 
die too quickly, as the sun shines. Men earn enough, 
but spend too much. 

Unproductiveness is as bad as indolence. Faculty, 
time, and desire should be out at interest and be pro- 
ductive. 

If a man is great in the spiritual elements, he is great 
everywhere else ; but, if he is small there, he is small 
everywhere else. Not animalhood, but manhood, must 
be measured. 

The world has been made like a vast grinding-stone, 
on which to polish and sharpen men by attrition. 

The bottom of the brain, as a rule, is far stronger 
and more fruitful in our race than the top. 

Not the best but the worst parts of men are largely 
brought into activity by their surroundings in this world. 



Man. 



23 



He that keeps company better than himself rises 
higher. It is ruinous to go down for our company. 

The future of the races of mankind will probably be 
larger and nobler and better than anything that we 
can now take in by the utmost stretch of fancy or rea- 
son. 

There is no man that lives who does not need to be 
drilled, disciplined, and developed into something high- 
er and nobler and better than he is by nature. Life is 
one prolonged birth. 

A man who can not get angry is like a stream that 
can not overflow, that is always turbid. Sometimes 
indignation is as good as a thunder-storm in summer, 
clearing and cooling the air. 

He only is a man and she only is a woman who are 
adequate to the circumstances in which God's provi- 
dence puts them. Candles must have shelter and 
candlesticks, but stars are out in all weathers. 

No man has a right to make of his past life a 
stumbling-block, an obstruction in his way of going for- 
ward to a new and a higher life. 

There is the same fierce, destructive nature in man 
that there is in the lion and the tiger ; the same com- 
bative nature that there is in the wolf; the same cun- 
ning, artful nature that there is in the fox. We have 
not descended from animals, we are with them yet. 

A man ought not to be like clay, that flattens out 
when it is thrown upon the ground, but like an India- 
rubber ball, that springs back when it strikes a solid 
body. 



24 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

The tongue draws men like music, or it drives men 
like a scourge. 

The tongue is the mitrailleuse of the body, and men 
are slaughtered by the wholesale before it. 

In his natural state every man is a commonwealth in 
anarchy. 

No man is such a conqueror as the man who has 
defeated himself. 

Anxiety, fear, ill-fated desire, are signatures on the 
human face. Suffering and anxious care are written 
there. 

Human laws, institutions of every kind, public opin- 
ion, the customs of society, all things tend to hold a 
man up so long as he is virtuous ; but, broken down, pub- 
lic opinion, customs, institutions, and laws are all against 
him and hinder his recovery. 

There is nothing so helpless as a man floundering 
under the fruits of his transgression, with the suspicion 
and unsympathy of the world in which he lives against 
him. 

Little angers, petty, surly tempers, how mean they 
are ! They are worse in a man than Canada thistles are 
on a farm. They are worthless themselves, and they 
root out things that are good and useful. 

As when you attempt to catch a moth, you find it so 
small that, though you grasp it tightly, you can not hurt 
it ; so, when memory grasps some men's qualities, so 
frivolous are they that you can neither catch nor hold 
them. 



Man. 



25 



That which lowers the sacredness of man is the 
greatest evil that can visit a nation ; for a nation is made 
rich by its manhood, and is poor when manhood is at a 
discount. 

Men go, as the Western herds do to a stack, and pull 
out mouthfuls of time, which, instead of being wisely- 
employed, are trodden under foot and wasted. 

Men ought to be young till they die, so far as energy, 
persistence, ambition, and augmentation of resources are 
concerned. 

Man can not be man without the predominance of 
the spiritual elements over the carnal. For the most 
part, spiritual qualities are but as flowers in a button-hole. 

Some of the best things that men ever do are things 
that they do, as it were, accidentally. Their very virtues 
are accidental. 

A man that does hot know how to be angry does not 
know how to be good. Now and then a man should be 
shaken to the core with indignation over things evil. 

An indolent man is like an unoccupied dwelling : 
scoundrels sometimes burrow in it; thieves and evil 
characters make it their haunt ; or, if they do not, it is 
fall of vermin. 

We have a dividend in that common glory which be- 
longs to mankind by reason of the life and of the deeds 
of every heroic nature. 

The man who perceives life only with his eye, his 
ear, his hand, and his tongue, is but little higher than 
the ox or an intelligent dog ; but he who has imagination 
sees things around and above him, as the angels see them. 
3 



26 Proverbs from Plymouth PulpiL 



That kind of refinement which shuts up a man to a 
little handful of people, that makes a needle of a man 
with a very sharp point and a very small eye, which leads 
a man forever to keep himself apart from his fellow-men, 
is not God's refinement. It is the phosphorescence of 
selfishness. 

Good-nature is worth more than knowledge, more 
than money, more than honor, to the persons who pos- 
sess it, and certainly to everybody who dwells with them, 
in so far as mere happiness is concerned. 

Good-nature, when it is a birthright, is based on 
good health and moderately fair circumstances, and is 
better than genius, better than property, better than ex- 
ternal honors. 

He whose disposition is cheerful, imaginative, and 
humorous, has a summer of the soul ; and in that sum- 
mer atmosphere reason will act more clearly, conscience 
will be sounder, fidelity will act better, than if they are 
exercised in a frigid zone, or in the chills and peltings of 
a morose disposition. 

In hours of doubt it seems labor thrown away to 
undertake to change the great human race. It is only 
when looking into the eyes of Jesus which carry light 
everywhere that we can have hope that every man can 
be changed into a son of God. 

No man in this world can thrive and build himself 
up who does not love the world, its industries, its enter- 
prise, and its attainments. 

It is sympathy with human life that inspires genial 
activities and keeps men within suitable restraint. 



Manhood. 



27 



The adult population of the world are knotted and 
warted with bad habits, and it would seem impossible to 
get a clean man of them. But Christ says, " Go, wash ! " 
and they return clean. 

Many men are stored full of unused knowledge. 
Like loaded guns, that are never fired off, or military 
magazines in times of peace, they are stuffed with use- 
less ammunition. 



MANHOOD. 

The truest self-respect is not to think of self. Self- 
contemplation is apt to end in self-conceit. 

Every man has laid up in his nature an absolute sov- 
ereignty over himself, whether he finds it or not. One 
may come to it in one way, and another in another ; but, 
if you come to it by none of the ways, it is still there — 
an unused sovereignty. 

A man is educated just in the proportion in which, by 
his soul-power, he controls the conditions of his life ; and 
a man is uneducated just in the proportion in which he 
is controlled by his external conditions. 

God made every man to have power to be mightier 
than the events round about him ; to hold by his firm 
will the reins by which all things are guided. 

The manly man is one who always finds excuses for 
others, but never for himself. 



28 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

A loving heart, a genuine sympathy, a pure, unadul- 
terated taste, a life that is not scorched by dissipation 
or wasted by untimely hours, a good, sound body and a 
clear conscience, ought to make any man happy. 

Self-indulgence is a moth and rust that utterly cor- 
rupts true manhood. 

This world is God's workshop for making men in. 

It is the very ideal of true manhood not to be sup- 
pressed. A man should lay it down in his mind, when 
he begins life, " I am, and I will be, superior to my cir- 
cumstances." 

If there is no difference between you and other peo- 
ple, except that you wear drab and they wear broadcloth, 
then there is no difference at all. 

What is a man worth that should spend five years in 
making a pin, which is nothing but a pin after it is made ? 
Diminutive art is mere trifling. 

No man is good for anything who has not some par- 
ticle of obstinacy to use upon occasion. 

Manhood is developed where men mingle with men, 
and are tempted to selfishness, and rise above it ; to pride, 
and hold it in subjection. It is where men are tempted 
to be fiery, and bitter, and cruel, and greedy, and ag- 
gressive, that they strengthen the opposite tendency. 

It is a man dying with his harness on that angels love 
to escort upward. 

Many men come into the harbor of old age empty. 
They have used their manhood for fuel to make steam 
for the voyage. 



Manhood, 



29 



Blessed is the man who gathers as he goes symmetry, 
shapeliness, temper^ quality, adaptation, so that when he 
issues from the farther side of this world he is a perfect 
man. 

Christ's ideal of manhood is power in the head, and 
power in the heart, and art in the hand, with the hu- 
miliation of love, and carried down to the lowest and 
meanest, if thereby they may be helped. 

It is the man who puts the vigor and enthusiasm 
which God inspires into the life that now is who will be 
fitted for the world that is to come. " Having done all, 
stand." 

God rolls this round globe like a grindstone, that by 
its very attrition men may be made bright and sharp. 

If we would have anything of benefit we must earn 
it ; and earning it makes men shrewd, inventive, ingen- 
ious, active, enterprising. 

Where all of the man is what property he owns, it 
does not take long to annihilate him. 

A man that is afraid is never a man. Strength in every 
part, and love round about all, is the receipt for manhood. 

The carrying of man up toward the ideal of man- 
hood develops him away from force and brutality, and 
toward pity and compassion. The further you go from 
typical man, the more you lose pity as a constituent ele- 
ment. 

While the executive part of some men grows sharper 
and more effective as they advance in life, those things 
which constitute noble traits grow worse and worse, till 
nothing seems left in old age but teeth and claws. 



3<D Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



No office can make a worthless man respectable. A 
tallow-candle does not become wax by being put in a 
golden candlestick. 

Wherever you find patience, fidelity, honor, kindness, 
truth, there you find respectability — however obscure 
and lowly men may be. 

If there was no grit in a grindstone, how long would 
the axe be in grinding? And, if affairs had no pinch in 
them, when would there be made a man ? 

There never will come a day in which a man can 
be made into a man, except by going into the fire, and 
on to the anvil, and under the hammer. 

The perfect manhood of the race in Christ Jesus is 
the errand of Christianity. 

A thorough-bred horse can be told by what he can 
endure. In a charge across a long, plowed field the old 
hacks will break down, while the thorough-bred horses 
scarcely show fatigue. So it is with men. 

Only give leadership to the moral sentiments, and 
then let on even-thing that God gave a man when he 
made him. The more there is of him the better. The 
animal instincts may be abeyed so long as the moral sen- 
timents carry the scepter. 

God is working upon men in various ways to bring 
them up out of their shuffling condition, and to fit them 
for a higher manhood, and make them instruments of 
good. 

When a man comes to die, then all there is in him of 
manhood goes with him, and all the rest is baggage. 



The Human Mind. 



3i 



A man might as well expect to think or dream of a 
house or a ship as to build up habits by easy indifference 
and well-wishing. 

A man should hold himself adequate to any place or 
function; and he should understand that God has a 
providence for every circumstance, and that he never puts 
a burden on shoulders that have not strength to bear it. 

The great problem of this world is how to maintain 
manhood while one is feeding through the mouth, through 
the ear, and through the eye. 

A man without self-restraint is like a barrel without 
hoops, and tumbles to pieces. 

He who is to be a man of might among men, and a 
master of men, must have mind and will ; but he must 
have stomach and breast also, for the gun-carriage must 
be in proportion to the gun which it bears. 



THE HUMAN MIND. 

Feeling is the bow, and thought the arrow. Alone 
one is as helpless as the other. The head gives artillery, 
the heart powder ; the one aims, the other fires. 

The imagination is the secret and marrow of civili- 
zation. It is the very eye of faith. The soul without 
imagination is what an observatory would be without a 
telescope. 



32 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

The soul's hours of strong excitement are its lumin- 
ous hours — its mountains of vision, from which it looks 
over the landscape of life with unobstructed gaze, and 
takes bearings for its direction when going down into 
the valley. 

There is no passion of the human soul so persistent 
and universal as that of hatred. Race hatreds, religious 
hatreds, hatreds of rivalry, of jealousy, of fear, of in- 
terest, abound. Every one has conscience enough to 
hate, few have religion enough to love. 

Conscience stands back of all other courts, and has, 
in the last estate, to try every course and every pro- 
cedure. 

Sometimes fear is wholesome and rational ; it is well 
to swing fear as a mighty battle-axe over men's heads 
when no other motive will move them. 

Theology is nothing but mental philosophy applied 
to the divine mind and the divine government. 

Perverted pride is a great misfortune in men ; but 
pride in its original function, for which God created it, 
is indispensable to a proper manhood. 

The rarest feeling that ever lights the human face is 
the contentment of a loving soul. 

Words are but the bannerets of a great army, a few 
bits of waving color here and there ; thoughts are the 
main body of the footmen that march unseen below. 

The center of nature is in the human mind. The 
meaning of the outward world is not in itself, but 
in us. 



The Human Mind. 



33 



Strong as is money and invincible, yet, in the long 
run, ideas are mightier than money. Tyrannies are 
overthrown by ideas. Armies are defeated by ideas. 
Nations, and Time itself, are overmatched by ideas. 

The sphere that is deepest, most unexplored, and 
most unfathomable, the wonder and glory of God's 
thought and hand, is our own soul ! 

Teaching gives ideas, training reduces ideas to hab- s> 
its. Teaching gives knowledge, training reduces it to 
character. 

All our other faculties seem to have the brown touch 
of earth upon them, but the imagination carries the 
very livery of heaven, and is God's self in the soul. 

A propensity to talk is as much a natural gift as a 
propensity to invent or construct. 

Like waves, our feelings may continue by repeating 
themselves, by intermittent rushes ; but no emotion any 
more than a wave can long retain its own individual 
form. 

One of the original tendencies of the human mind, 
fundamental and universal, is the love of other people's 
private affairs. 

It is not probable that the same state of mind in all 
its details has ever been twice produced exactly alike 
by any text of Scripture or any passage of Shakespeare. 
Variation is inevitable. 

He will see most without who has the best eyes with- 
in; and he who only sees with his bodily organs sees 
but the surface. 



34 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him 
have common sense. If he has that and uncommon sense 
too, he is not far from genius. 

There was no instrument that was ever struck that 
had such music as every faculty of the human soul has 
in it. God never made anything else so beautiful as 
man. 

The battles in which thoughts are the only swords, 
and purposes are the only spears, and tears are the only 
shots — the inward struggles of men's souls — these are, 
after all, the mightiest battles, though unseen and unre- 
corded. 

All words are pegs to hang ideas on. 

Excitements among a thinking people tend to clearer 
convictions, to surer intuitions, to more heroic pur- 
poses, and loftier enthusiasm. 

Involuntariness is the test of all excellence. No 
man does any thing perfectly who does it on purpose. 

Men take on things first because they ought to; at 
length they practice them because they like to ; and 
finally they do them because they do not think any- 
thing about them. But subtly, at the bottom, there is 
the sense and fact of duty. 

There are people who have ripples, but never waves ; 
who have surface feelings, but never depths of feeling. 

The more the human mind is developed, the more 
numerous are its wants to be supplied ; and blessed is 
that nation which has to supply the wants of a civilized 
people. 



The Human Mind. 



35 



Hope, wit, imagination, constitute the buoyant tem- 
perament. God wants all these radiant, joy-breeding, 
joy-dispensing traits developed. 

No man can be well educated who has not in his in- 
tellect the color, and the inspiration, and the warmth, 
that the sentiments and emotions give. 

There is nothing which vanity does not desecrate. 

Men have a thousand desires to a bushel of choices, 
as there are a thousand blossoms to every bushel of 
apples. 

It is not possible that one should be under the do- v 
minion of a noble feeling, and not look beautiful in the 
face. 

Fear, shame, self-respect, and self-interest, hold in 
check cruelty and cunning, and all forms of passion, and 
all gross and sensual appetites, and in so far are the 
auxiliaries of conscience. 

In regard to the great mass of men, anything that 
breaks the realm of fear is not salutary, but dangerous ; 
because it takes off one of the hoops that hold the barrel 
together in which the evil spirits are confined. 

On account of their excess and abuse, men call the 
engineering instincts passions. They are the working 
powers by which men strive with Nature, and strive for 
success in the bodily life. 

God plants no yearning in the human soul that he 
does not intend to satisfy. 

Every human faculty kicks back with just as much 
pain as it thrusts forward with pleasure. 



36 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



There are materials enough in every man's mind to 
make a hell there. 

All the faculties of man's mind need breaking, har- 
nessing, and right directing ; but they must not be killed 
or maimed. 

A good conscience riles up love, and gives it back- 
bone, and makes it clean to the core, solid, strong, effica- 
cious. 

We carry to men the same faculties that are active in 
us, and excite in them the same feelings. Irritability 
produces irritation. Pride excites pride and the resist- 
ance of pride ; mirth rouses mirth ; anger, anger. 

We ought to be ten times as hungry for knowledge 
as for food for the body. 

In the natural order of the human mind, to every 
faculty there is its counterpoise. If there is justice, 
there is benevolence. If there be combativeness, there 
is its tenderness ; if fear, also courage. 

People should be hungry with the eye and the ear, as 
well as with the mouth. 

It is a hard thing for a man to take such an instru- 
ment as the human mind and keep it in tune with itself, 
and also keep it in accord with other minds, with their 
different temperaments, and in all their varying moods, 
and under all their trials and swayings, and warpings and 
biasings. 

In things pertaining to enthusiasm, no man is sane 
who does not know how to be insane on proper occa- 
sions. 



The Human Mind. 



37 



As men are cultivated, the feelings carry with them 
intellect, and the intellect carries feeling ; they are not 
separated. 

The human soul is God's treasury, out of which he 
coins unspeakable riches. Thoughts and feelings, desires 
and yearnings, faith and hope — these are the most pre- 
cious things which God finds in us. 

Every feeling like a flail should come down, and 
bring out some wheat on the great thrashing-floor of 
life. 

A perfect feeling eventuates in some form of action. 
Unfruitful feelings, even if they are not spurious, are 
likely to become morbid, irregular, mischievous. Action 
is the right outlet of emotion. 

There is nothing that is so wonderfully created as 
the human soul. There is something of God in it. We 
are infinite in the future, though we are finite in the 
past. 

Man's reason is overhung by the imagination, and is 
energized by it, and so is made more valuable than it 
can be in its barren, material, practical self. 

The soul is a temple ; and God is silently building 
it, by night and by day. Precious thoughts are build- 
ing it ; disinterested love is building it ; all-penetrating 
faith is building it. 

When a man is born, his faculties are there, like so 
many masses of paint on a painter's palette. There are 
pictures in those paints, but they will never appear till 
some hand fashions them. 
4 



38 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

As the flute has its quality of sound, and the clarionet 
and the trumpet have each their own, so different minds 
have their own peculiar qualities, that set them apart 
from all others. 

So long as the world lasts, the enlightened head will 
be master of the unenlightened head ; a man with a 
large head and an enlightened mind is superior to a man 
with a small head and an unenlightened mind, and must 
rule. 

A practical, matter-of-fact man is like a wagon with- 
out springs : every single pebble on the road jolts him ; 
but a man with imagination has springs that break the 
jar and jolt. 

In man mirth may rise to the dignity of a moral 
faculty. 

Our finer feelings are like the evening primrose ; all 
the sunlight but shuts them closer. They blossom only 
in twilight. 

People of too much sentiment are like fountains, 
whose overflow keeps a disagreeable puddle about them. 

Conceit is the most incurable disease that is known 
to the human soul. 

Conceit, if it be present in youth, is stronger in man- 
hood, and is strongest in old age. 

A man's real style is like his skin : the shape of his 
skin is the shape of his body. If the style is obscure 
and convoluted, it is because the man was so himself. 



Business. 



39 



BUSINESS. 

Merchants, who live upon confidence and credit, 
can ill afford to undermine the conscience of the com- 
munity. Anything which weakens or paralyzes this is 
taking beams from the foundations of the merchant's own 
warehouse. 

All the humblest avocations are so arranged that, 
while they serve to support the workman, they do even 
more for the community than for him that follows them. 
There is a benevolence in all wise selfishness. 

It takes a man to make a devil ; and the fittest man 
for such a purpose is a snarling, waspish, red-hot creditor. 

Like a gun that fires at the muzzle and kicks over at 
the breech, a cheating transaction hurts the cheater as 
much as the man cheated. 

Men who have been very stingy and very grasping are 
usually men who have very strong commercial instincts. 

More influences forming the opinions, habits, and 
characters of men spring out of business than out of 
almost all other relations which men sustain. 

No man has a right to put his character for integrity 
and honesty upon a commercial venture. 

Customs represent the experience of mankind ; and, 
in commerce, equity, fidelity, and integrity are simply 
customs. Experience is the mother of custom. 

There is not one whom we employ who does not, 
like ourselves, desire recognition, praise, gentleness, for- 
bearance, patience. 



4-0 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

A man that has simplicity, honesty, truthfulness, 
purity, and fidelity, whether he is rich or poor, is pros- 
perous. 

A simple-minded man, that is honest, that is trust- 
worthy by reason of his fidelity, has an uncomplicated 
way to walk in, free from anxiety and fear. 

Good judgment is to business what good steering is 
to navigation. Moral elements enter largely into good 
judgment. 

A reputation for good judgment, for fair dealing, for 
truth, and for rectitude, is itself a fortune. 

God made the course of Nature so that it is more 
profitable to be right than to be wrong. God made the 
absolute nature of society such that righteousness profits 
in the long run better than wickedness. 

The man who has the good-will and the good-nature 
of the men among whom he lives, of the society in which 
he dwells, is like a craft that has wind and currents both 
in its favor. 

Prosperity in life largely depends upon the good-will 
and confidence of those with whom we deal. Truth, 
honesty, fidelity, and purity win confidence. 

Men go shopping just as men go out fishing or hunt- 
ing, to see how large a fish may be caught with the small- 
est hook. 

When a man sells eleven ounces for twelve, he makes 
a compact with the devil, and sells himself for the value 
of an ounce ; he sells himself to as many devils as the 
number of times that he sells eleven ounces for twelve. 



Business. 



4i 



It is the front part of the counter that corrupts the 
back part. Men that sell are perverted by the men that 
buy. Buyers seek "bargains," instead of being willing 
to render an equivalent for what they receive. 

How many pretenses men that sell goods weave! 
What poor articles, with what a good face, do they palm 
off on their customers ! 

No man should wish another man's property without 
rendering for it a full equivalent. 

A man can impart to a business a flavor of honor by 
his own conduct, which shall make it thereafter more 
creditable to any one who enters it. 

In the ordinary business of life, industry can do any- 
thing which genius can do, and very many things which 
it can not. Genius is a steed too fiery for the plow or 
cart. 

The conceptions of Michael Angelo's genius would 
have perished like a night's fantasy had not his industry 
given them permanence. 

There is no sponge that will suck, in so short a time, 
so vast a quantity of money, as a farm recklessly car- 
ried on. 

Interest works night and day, in fair weather and in 
foul. It gnaws at a man's substance with invisible teeth. 
It binds industry with its film, as a fly is bound upon a 
spider's web. 

Debt rolls a man over and over, binding him hand 
and foot, and letting him hang upon the fatal mesh until 
the long-legged interest devours him. 



42 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

It is a good sign where a man is proud of his work 
or his calling. 

One may work with the hands before breakfast, but 
not much with the head. The machine must be wound 
up. The blue must be taken out of your spirits, and 
the gray out of your eyes. 

The commerce of the world is conducted by the 
strong ; and usually it operates against the weak. 

If you sell your conscience to Interest, you traffic 
with a fiend. 

Every young man would do well to heed this : Suc- 
cessful business stands upon the inevitable foundation 
of morality. 

To-morrow, when you go into your business and find 
twenty thousand dollars that can easily be scooped up, 
and the law on your side — and the devil, too — look into 
the invisible and see the crown which angels have for 
him who shall say, " Get thee behind me, Satan! " 

Organized business is a thing of law; and law is 
always hard and unrelenting toward the weak. 

Uprightness has more genius, more executiveness, 
more aptitude for business than knavery. 

A young man should go out of an establishment where 
he is required to do wicked things quicker than a shot 
goes out of a cannon when it is fired ! 

The bread which we solicit of God, he gives us 
through our own industry. Prayer sows it and industry 
reaps it. 



Business, 



43 



Debt is an inexhaustible fountain of dishonesty. 

Of all things on earth next to his God, a broken 
man should cling to a courageous industry. 

Blessed be the man whose work drives him. Some- 
thing must drive men ; and if it is wholesome industry, 
they have no time for a thousand torments and tempta- 
tions. 

The distresses, the cares, the vexations of business — 
these are smooth words; but there is more suffering at 
disastrous times in a business life than ever was seen 
in the Inquisition of Spain or Rome. 

The habit of trifling with property by careless ex- 
penditure often degenerates to worthlessness, indolence, 
and roguery. 

He is the happiest man who is engaged in a business 
which tasks the most faculties of his mind. 

Work is not the curse, but drudgery is. 

The business of life is largely made up of minute 
affairs, requiring only judgment and diligence. 

What genius beholds with a flash of the eye, indus- 
try gains by a succession of blows. Men see the result, 
and care not for the process. 

The purest pleasures lie within the circle of useful 
occupation. Mere pleasure — sought outside of useful- 
ness — is fraught with poison. 

Young business men are often educated in two very 
unthrifty species of contempt — a contempt for small 
gains, and a contempt for hard labor. 



44 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 



They who slowly amass the gains of useful industry, 
build upon a rock ; and they who fling together the 
imaginary millions of commercial speculation, build upon 
the sand. 

Some men with a good trade perpetually burn up 
their luck by their hot temper. 

A life of slippery experience can have but a disas- 
trous end. 

Business men are to be pitied who do not recognize 
the fact that the largest side of their secular business is 
benevolence. 

A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a 
machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a 
machine augments the power of a man and the well- 
being of mankind. 

No man ever manages a legitimate business in this 
life without doing indirectly far more for other men 
than he is trying to do for himself. 

Every mechanic should make himself a respectable 
mathematician. 

Blood tells in horses, and intelligence tells in men. 
The intelligent man makes a far better laborer than the 
stupid man. 

Intelligence increases mere physical ability one half. 
The use of the head abridges the labor of the hands. 

There is no calling that is not made better by brains. 
No matter what a man's work is, he is a better man for 
having a thorough mind- drilling. 



Business. 



45 



They who make gods of goods, and go bowed down 
under the gold they carry, are worse off than they 
who journey wearily over the hot sands of the desert. 

Credit demands the solid rock of integrity. It will 
not stand upon the shifting sands of custom. The mer- 
chant should be a Puritan in morals. 

The world's strength lies in the million hands of 
producers and exchangers. Power has shifted. No 
matter who reigns — the merchant reigns. 

Many men in New York get so used to failures that 
they expect them as much as ten-pins expect to be 
tripped up ; it is part of the game. If they do not 
expect it, their neighbors do. 

Nothing requires truth so much in the inward nature 
as credit ; and business, above all other things, stands 
upon credit. Anything that destroys integrity in the 
individual, destroys credit in business. 

He who sells work sells brains. " Skilled work " is 
nothing but work vitalized by fine brain. 

To the end of time the artist will be worth more 
than the artisan, the artisan will be worth more than 
the laborer, and the laborer will be worth more than the 
drudge. 

It is unconscious skill and excellence that win. 

Men that fill our houses with conveniences, with 
comforts, with various instruments by which our time is 
redeemed to higher and nobler uses, men that make im- 
plements, are they not benefactors ? 



46 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



It is not work that kills men, it is worry. Work is 
healthful, worry is rust upon the blade. Fear secretes 
acids, but love and trust are sweet juices. 

The merchant, the mechanic, the day-laborer, bear- 
ing endless benefactions to the community, why do they 
not regard their labors in a higher light ? 

Just in proportion as you make machine-slaves — the 
only slaves that are fit for this world — just in that pro- 
portion you redeem the mind to greater leisure, and to 
a larger sphere for the moral functions of manhood. 



CHARACTER. 

Character, like porcelain-ware, must be painted 
before it is glazed. There can be no change of color 
after it is burned in. 

Men lose wisdom just in proportion as they are con- 
ceited. 

A lie is a very short wick in a very small lamp. The 
oil of reputation is very soon sucked up and gone. And 
just as soon as a man is known to lie, he is like a two- 
foot pump in a hundred-foot well. He can not touch 
bottom at all. 

When the stuff that is called men in our day — the 
buyable, the bribable stuff — is washed away in the sew- 
er, there are men who will stand, and whose names will 
be held in everlasting remembrance. 



Character. 



47 



A man rotten in heart, ragged in morals, deceitful in 
his ways, full of all manner of verminous immoralities — 
base, loathsome men — may have prosperity for a mo- 
ment, but can not, until God is forsworn, be happy or 
enduring. 

A man's reputation sometimes is as wide as the hori- 
zon, when his character is no bigger than the point of a 
needle. Character is what a man really is, reputation is 
what men believe him to be. 

There are many men who, when they wish to meas- 
ure their own girth, measure all that they own, and call 
that I, as if one should weigh all the chaff that grows in 
his wheat-field and call it wheat. 

A man's reputation always tracks him and follows 
him ; and, if it is in him to be dishonest, it is in other 
people to know it. 

What a man is, you would not suspect from what you 
see of him here. Our summer is too short and too cold 
for ripening. Men may blossom on the earth, but do 
not bear ripe fruit, at any rate, of their higher attri- 
butes. 

It is a mark of true nobility for a young man to go 
into the city and be introduced, it may be, into his em- 
ployer's family, and to stand up, without blushing, in 
his plain home-made coat, and say, "I can not afford 
anything better." 

There is no such sculpture as that of character. 

A man should first think of his character and then 
of his condition. Character will draw after it condi- 
tion. 



48 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 



The epitaph of the covetous man, as given in Jere- 
miah, is, " He is buried with the burial of an ass " (Jere- 
miah xxii, 19). 

To the covetous man life is a nightmare, and God 
lets him wrestle with it as best he may. 

The greedy man says the chief end of man is to 
glorify gold, and to enjoy it forever. 

Thorough selfishness destroys or paralyzes enjoy- 
ment. A heart made selfish by the contest for wealth 
is like a citadel stormed in war, utterly shattered. 

As any one of the better feelings becomes predomi- 
nant over the others, men feel that character is growing 
lovely, attractive, admirable, as they say. And these are 
only step-stone words that bring us to the last one — 
beautiful. 

A good character, good habits, and iron industry are 
impregnable to the assaults of all the ill-luck that fools 
ever dreamed of. 

Never deliberate on your word when given, but let it 
go as the arrow goes to the target — let it strike and stand. 

Nothing is so much in demand as simple untempta- 
bility in men— men held by the fear of God and by the 
love of rectitude to that which is right. 

Sterling sense and industry and integrity are better 
a thousand times in the hard work of living than the 
brilliance of wit or the glamour of genius. 

It is impossible to indulge in habitual severity of 
opinion upon our fellow-men, without injuring the ten- 
derness and delicacy of our own feelings. 



Character. 



49 



The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a 
man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human 
owl, vigilant in darkness, and blind to light, mousing for 
vermin, and never seeing noble game. 

Men want to build themselves as carpenters build 
bureaus, using pine for the whole substance of it, and a 
little thin veneering for a finish to make it look beau- 
tiful. 

There are numberless men whose consciences have 
rotted, from circumference to core, and yet the skin is 
fair and tempting. 

Self-conceited men may be sharp, acute, pungent — 
they may have spear-like force of character, but they are 
never broad and round, never of full-proportioned man- 
hood. 

Before men we are as opaque bee-hives : they can not 
see our thoughts working within us. Before God we are 
as glass bee-hives. 

Man's most central and radical ideas must be God- 
ward before he will be headed right and sailing heaven- 
ward. 

* Many a mourner over a wasted life may yet be 
shown that he was fruitful of good when he knew it 
not. 

No man can live in God's government with selfish- 
ness without being a traitor. 

There is no sight more beautiful than a character 
which has been steadfastly growing in every direction, 
and has come to old age rich and ripe. 
5 



50 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

There is no uncentered character anywhere. There 
is a point in every man's character which rules, and to 
which everything is brought for comparison and settle- 
ment. 

A mean man, though he has a crown on, is vulgar, 
and a pauper with a king's soul in him is royal. 

To be a self-centered individual, plenary in reason 
and in moral sense, is to be like God. 

Excess in youth in regard to animal indulgence is 
bankruptcy in old age. 

The character of worldly men is shaped by the in- 
fluence of the love of property, of power, of influence, 
of praise, and the love of animal indulgence — not by the 
right, the true, the noble. 

Our characters are dressed for inspection, as apples 
are when they are sent to market. There are all sorts 
in the middle of the barrel, and the best ones are put on 
the top to face off with. 

Many men are square-built, conscience-framed men, 
harsh and unlovely. Conscience without love is like a 
skeleton without flesh. 

To make conscience tolerable, love should be thrown 
around it. Conscience is the frame of character, and 
love is the covering for it. 

Pride is essential to a noble character, and the love 
of praise is one of the civilizing elements ; these influ- 
ences conjoined under right directions and inspirations 
tend to ennoble, to soften, to sweeten, and to beautify 
human nature. 



The World. 



5i 



Whenever a man stands on integrity and truth in the 
midst of men who are dishonest and knavish, he is the 
natural judge of those men, and God's appointed supe- 
rior to them. 

Quality and power of emotion are the noblest ele- 
ments of character ; and reason and knowledge and ex- 
perience work to and for that which is the essential being, 
namely, emotion, out of which comes disposition. 

Good-nature is often a mere matter of health. With 
good digestion, you are apt to be good-natured ; with 
bad digestion, you are morose. 

The sweeping-machines of New York city leave the 
streets clean behind them by gathering up and carrying 
off, in their own bellies, the dust and the dirt. But mul- 
titudes of men there are that are full of dust and dirt 
collected from the streets, and yet leave everything foul 
behind them. 



THE WORLD. 

There have been human hearts constituted just 
like ours for six thousand years. The head learns new 
things, but the heart for evermore practices old experi- 
ences. 

If a man is odious in society, he might as well be in 
prison. The worst prisons are not of stone ; they are of 
throbbing hearts, outraged by an infamous life. 



52 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

In this world it is not what we take up, but what we 
give up, that makes us rich. 

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender 
shadows which our sorrows cast. 

One man's heart beating against yours may be little 
to you ; but when it is the echo of a thousand hearts, 
you can not resist it. Private opinion is weak, but pub- 
lic opinion is almost omnipotent. 

As long as God lives, and is what he is — " the Father 
of mercies, and the God of all comfort " — so long this 
world is not going to rack and ruin. 

The world never let a man bless it but it first fought 
him ; it never let him give it a boon without first giving 
him a buffet. 

It is a bad plan to keep by yourself too much. A 
man never went into the wilderness in this world that 
the devil did not go with him. 

Nothing is finished in this world. Every step is a 
preparation for the next. 

This is a very good world for the purposes for which 
it was built ; and that is all anything is good for. 

Nothing makes the world so precious, so little barren, 
and so rich, nothing so takes away its sordidness, as 
the knowledge of God's solicitude concerning it, and 
his care over it. 

As wounded wolves are said to be turned upon by 
the rest of the pack and torn to pieces, so men that 
have done wrong are turned upon and cast down, and 
rent and torn, by the rest of the community. 



The World. 



53 



This world is magnificent for strangers and pilgrims, 
but miserable for residents. 

We are forged like a sword in this world, to be used 
hereafter. 

The world is a great, rattling manufactory. Our 
life is in the loom ; it rolls up and is hidden as fast as it 
is woven. It is to be taken out of the loom only when 
we leave this world ; then only shall we see the pattern. 

The world has become very much like a treadmill. 
Formerly the wheel revolved so slowly that men could 
keep step, the laziest of them ; but the great world now 
whirls round so fast that a man must run or drag. 

If one's heart rubs only against books, it gets rusty 
and dry. We need to magnetize our hearts with living 
hearts and real feelings. Break bread often with com- 
mon people. 

As long as society is absolutely divided as milk is, 
the cream being at the top and the impoverished milk 
at the bottom, so long will society be unbalanced, and 
liable to be thrown into convulsions out of which will 
spring wars. A circulation throughout keeps it in health. 

In every score of men there are nine or ten who are 
weak, who need to be helped, whose life will fail if it is 
not crutched up, and who are largely dependent on their 
social surroundings for what they are. 

In time and history we have seen the worst. Tak- 
ing the world as a whole, it is rising, and is to rise. 

Few men who have come to gray hairs utter any such 
nonsense as that this world is good enough for them. 



54 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

There is a specialty of work in the world for each 
man. But the man must search for it, for it will not 
hunt for the man. 

The sweetest and most generous natures are the 
ones in greatest danger of becoming soured through the 
ingratitude of the world. 

The world is God's journal wherein he writes his 
thoughts and traces his tastes. 

Men are not put into this world to be everlastingly 
played on by the harping fingers of joy. 

The undertone of human society is sad, as the sound 
of the ocean. 

This is a good grinding world, a good sharpening 
world, a good stimulating world. It is not a restful 
world. 

This is a good world to sin in ; but, so far as men are 
concerned, it is a very hard world to repent in. It is a 
bitter world ; it is a cruel world. 

In nations like our own there are, at the bottom of 
society, elements which are as savage as any to be found 
among savage nations. The stratum next above this is 
composed of people that are as much barbarians as any 
on the globe ; and the next above are as much semi- 
civilized as the inhabitants of China ; above these are a 
civilized class, and still above are a class that are spir- 
itual. 

If it were not for God, the world would be like 
a menagerie broken loose, whose keeper had gone 
home. 



Success. 



55 



God administers over this world for the education 
and up-building of the race ; and for this end has har- 
nessed the world in laws, which are appointed to be the 
paths along which men's feet shall walk easily : laws 
give us wings that we could have in no other way. 

This world is not swinging away in a crazy surge, 
bumping and blundering through an ocean of time. It 
has a voyage. It has a destiny and a glorious harbor. 

The bottom of society wages clandestine war with 
the top, throwing up mire and dirt. 



SUCCESS. 

Selfish prosperity makes a man a vortex rather 
than a fountain • instead of throwing out, he learns only 
to draw in. 

Success is full of promise till men get it, and then it 
seems like a nest from which the bird has flown. 

Not that which men do worthily, but that which they 
do successfully, is what history makes haste to record. 

There are prosperous people who use the whole of 
society as a cluster to be squeezed into their cup. 

God does a more wonderful thing when he holds all 
your faculties in such nice adjustment and perfect play 
that you win success, than if he had wrought that success 
himself by a miracle. 



56 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



It is the serpent-maxim that success atones for all 
faults. 

You can not succeed in life by spasmodic jerks. You 
can not win confidence, nor earn friendship, nor gain 
influence, nor attain skill, nor reach position, by violent 
snatches. 

A man may be superficially successful all his life long, 
and die hollow and worthless as a puff-ball. 

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, 
that determines the success of a voyage. 

The prizes in this world are placed where those men 
shall get them who, by opening and educating their 
powers, seek them. 

There are ten men that can succeed in the country 
where there is one that can succeed in the city. 

It is defeat that turns bone to flint, gristle to muscle, 
and makes men invincible. One is never so near victory 
as when defeated in a good cause. 

No man is prosperous whose immortality is forfeited. 
No man is rich to whom the grave brings eternal bank- 
ruptcy. 

Always reason up, never down. Give the greater 
advantage to the moral element, benevolence, conscience, 
humanity. The broader the pattern a man is made upon, 
the better can he control the elements of success. 

The law of success in the brute world, by which 
strength always wins and weakness is always compelled 
to yield, is the reverse of the law of the spiritual king- 
dom. 



Human Life. 



57 



So dependent is success upon patient industry, that 
he who seeks it otherwise tempts his own ruin. 

Human life takes care of the successful, the divine 
government takes care of the unsuccessful. If men 
crown the eminent, God crowns the lowly. 

Success surely comes with conscience in the long 
run, other things being equal. Capacity and fidelity 
are commercially profitable qualities. 

Men's best successes come after their disappoint- 
ments. 

Poverty runs down-hill and settles in the low places, 
while wealth can go up to the hill-top and select its own 
position. 



HUMAN LIFE. 

The civilization and the power of a people are meas- 
ured by the amount of moral cerebral excitement which 
they can generate. 

It is not merely cruelty that leads men to love war, 
it is excitement. It is not merely excitement, it is the 
excitement that discloses to them depths of power and 
averages of manhood far more in certain cases than 
belong to ordinary avocations in peace. 

There are nowhere such inexhaustible resources of 
excitement, wholesome in their kind, enduring without 
wasting men, as in the higher moral sentiments. 



58 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

A man can live forty years, and never be out from 
great excitement, and yet sleep well, and think well, and 
digest well, and be wholly healthy, if there is no malign 
element in it. 

Low measures of feeling are better than ecstasies for 
ordinary life. God sends his rains in gentle drops, else 
flowers would be beaten to pieces. 

There is always somebody to believe in any one who 
is uppermost. 

God sends experience to paint men's portraits. 

There are people who will be good-natured to all 
others about them, if there be some single person on 
whom they may vent their peevishness. Otherwise, 
for want of a chimney, they will fill the room with 
smoke. 

In this life, men are yet in thumb-pots, as it were, 
shifted from shelf to shelf by the gardener, preparatory 
to the coming summer, when they are to be turned out 
into the open field and garden. 

It is not the trumpeters that fight the battles — though 
you would think so to hear them ! — not the men of loud- 
est proclamations that shall stand highest in the world 
that is to come. 

There is much in life that is easily overcome, if there 
be a positive and steadfast resistance to it. But, if we 
are languid and pulseless, we become a prey to it. 

Our life should perpetually speak of generosities and 
magnanimities, as a band of music speaks sweet notes, 
spreading them far out through the air. 



Human Life. 



59 



Our faults are shot at us as bombs are shot at forts. 
Men explode their advice hatefully, and wonder at our 
want of meekness. 

One has not strength to look constantly upon the dark 
side of human nature. It would turn him sour and bitter. 

Discouragement is a mephitic gas which, if long con- 
tinued, strikes the vital parts and destroys life. 

Blessed be mirthfulness ! It is one of the renovators 
of the world. Men will let you abuse them if only you 
will make them laugh. 

Life owes you, in common with all others, just as much 
fruit, and no more, than climbing, you can bring down. 

There is nothing in this world so intolerable as the 
doing everything on purpose. 

The soft, gentle natures are often the hardest to be 
subdued. They yield and fly back. 

Life is a succession of zigzags, but a man pursues a 
straight enough voyage who reaches his definite purpose 
in the end. 

Our life touches concord only once in a while ; all the 
rest of the time it plays monochords or discords. 

Human life is one vast Campagna, and there are in 
the atmosphere around men silent, corrupting forces, of 
which they are quite unconscious, as persons are of 
malaria. 

We are all painting pictures in the dark. Oh, this 
painting in the dark ! What is to be revealed when the 
light comes ? 



6o Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



It is the passions that wear, the appetites that grind 
out the force of life. Excitement in the higher realm 
of feeling does not wear men out or waste them. The 
moral sentiments nourish and feed men. 

All the frescoes upon the Vatican are not so wonder- 
ful as those which our experience paints upon single 
days — that move on the horizon, sink, and disappear. 

Activity with mistakes is better than indolence with- 
out mistakes. ' 

There is no such moderation anywhere on earth as 
in an ice-house. Things are never disturbed there. 

There is in human life very little spiritual inspiration ; 
very little that men can get from each other ; very little 
that they can get from society ; very little that they can 
get from laws and institutions. Its source is above us. 

There is one thing that will not bear looking into, 
unless a man has a heart of philosophy (or a heart of 
stone), and that is human life. 

It is hard for a man to take the ideals of honor, and 
truth, and rectitude, and plow through life with them. 
It will breed conflicts with himself and with all others. 

Nobody comes into life with a trade in his hand, but 
with a hand fitted to learn a trade. Nobody comes into 
life with a philosophy in his head, but with a head that 
needs to learn philosophy. 

Human life is God's outer church. Its needs and 
urgencies are priests and pastors. 

A door that seems to stand open must be of a man's 
size, or it is not the door that Providence means for him. 



Human Life. 



61 



Life loves variety ; God loves variety ; and men do, 
when young and natural. The priest and the ruler run 
to fixed forms. 

The events of life contain in them the letters of God's 
will to individuals. 

Events are often like chestnut-burrs. If you give 
them a little frost, the burrs will open and show the in- 
side to be a great deal better than the outside. 

The petty moths of perpetual fretfulness, moroseness, 
sourness, fribbles of temper, cut the threads of life. 

What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way 
down to the coffin. 

Every development in human life should have its 
saccharine fermentation — enthusiasm. 

Life is a series of developments, one upon another, 
rising higher and higher, the superior stage perfectly 
comprehending the inferior, but the inferior stages never 
understanding the superior. 

The divinest and noblest inspiration of life is that 
with every coming of the morning comes God; with 
every going down of the sun God does not depart. He 
abides in the heaven and on the earth. 

Socially we are woven into the fabric of society, 
where every man is like one thread in a piece of cloth. 
No single thread has a right to say, " I will stay here no 
longer," and draw out. No man has a right to make a 
hole in the well-woven fabric of society. 

To array a man's will against his sickness is the su- 
preme art of medicine. 
6 



62 Pr over is from Plymouth Pulpit. 



POLITICAL. 

Our government is built upon the vote. But votes 
that are purchasable are quicksands, and a government 
built on them stands upon corruption and revolution. 

Aspiration for independence, ambition of social 
equality, and a determination that love shall work out 
for his children a better lot than their father had — these 
are mainly the causes of that pertinacious industry, that 
restless enterprise, that almost fierce economy, which 
has made the name of Yankee anything but compliment- 
ary. 

Truth, honor, purity, reverence, fidelity, industry, 
frugality, temperance, moderation, charity, and kindli- 
ness are political elements, without which politics and 
national life can not exist, and the state by schools 
should educate its citizens in fundamental morality. 

You never can develop men and bring them up from 
savage or barbarous conditions except by those ener- 
gies by which property is developed, and by that leisure 
which property gives. 

The mischiefs of anarchy have been equaled by the 
mischiefs of government. 

The rod of public sentiment makes many men cow- 
ards. There is no help greater, when it is rightly admin- 
istered, than public opinion ; and there is nothing that 
makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion. 

The want of moral culture invites oppression and ne- 
cessitates it, and it is for men to choose whether they 
will govern themselves or be governed. 



Political. 



63 



The Yankee grubs and grinds ; the Yankee pinches 
his coin with a finger scarcely less forcible than the die 
that stamped it ; but builds colleges, founds academies, 
beautifies villages, and establishes the economies that 
make the state rich. Stingy to himself, but bountiful 
to the commonwealth. 

In its intense individualism, in its real personal demo- 
cratic spirit, in its deep moral force, and, above all, in 
its household life, New England is pre-eminently He- 
braistic. * 

It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and 
then, after it has done its work, it usually takes a hun- 
dred years to get rid of it. 

The Saxon stock always ran toward republicanism ; 
the French stock, the Italian stock, the Spanish stock, 
all ran toward monarchism. 

Take all the robes of all the good judges that have 
ever lived on the face of the earth, and they would not 
be large enough to cover the iniquity of one corrupt 
judge. 

Public men are bees working in a glass hive; and 
curious spectators enjoy themselves in watching every 
secret movement, as if it were a study in natural history. 

It is a terrible state of things when judges walk upon 
gold in securing place, and then sit upon gold in the 
judgment-seat. 

The nation's armor of defense against the passions 
of men is the Constitution. Take that away, and the na- 
tion goes down into the field of its conflicts like a war- 
rior without armor. 



64 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

The history of the gospel has been a history of the 
development of Christian democratic ideas. 

In the United States the sympathy goes with the 
Government and not with the governing, as in other 
countries it goes with the governing and not with the 
governed. 

Plutocracy is to be the dangerous aristocracy of the 
future. 

As ignorance disappears, so disappear absolute mon- 
archies ; and, as ignorance comes back, so inevitably 
„ come back monarchies. 

There is no right more universal and more sacred, 
because lying so near to the root of existence, than the 
right of men to their own labor. 

Political dishonesty in voters runs into general dis- 
honesty, as a rotten speck taints the whole apple. 

The grossest, the crudest, the most selfish, the most 
easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is 
government. 

Armies are said to be cruel, and they are cruel. The 
only crueler thing than an army is a nation that has no 
army, and is uncivilized, savage, and beastly. 

The decay of civil institutions begins at the core. 

Whether a government with a crown or a ballot-box, 
it is a human device just as much as husbandry is, and 
just as much as the mechanic arts are. So also is it 
with the Church and all the ordinances of the Church. 
They are divine ; but so is every wise device of man- 
kind. 



Political. 



65 



The history of governments through the ages is a 
history red — nay, lurid. Law represents the effort of 
men to organize society ; governments, the efforts of 
selfishness to overthrow liberty. 

Nations are to-day just what, in feudal times, barons' 
castles were — armed against invasion day and night, and 
all the time. 

Laws are not masters but servants, and he rules them 
who obeys them. 

There are not more meshes in a net than there are 
in the administration of human justice. 

A republican government in a hundred points is 
weaker than an autocratic government ; but in this one 
point it is the strongest that ever existed — it has educated 
a race of men that are men. 

As nations grow better, they become profuse, and 
have the means of being so. 

The law of life is, that men, as they develop skill, can 
not afford to work cheaply. Nothing can work cheaply 
except that which is cheap. 

The law is a battery, which protects all that is behind 
it, but sweeps with destruction all that is outside. 

Natural aristocracy is the eminence of men over their 
fellows in real mind and soul. 

The scepter and the gag go together the world over. 

There is no part of government which can not better 
suffer derangement than the ballot. If you strike the 
ballot with disease, it is heart-disease. 



66 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

When good men combine to expel monsters, mon- 
sters will combine to destroy good men ; and when it 
comes to revolution, bad men are apt to have the ad- 
vantage. 

We have much to fear from great corporated, moneyed 
institutions. We are to-day more in danger from organ- 
ized money than ever we were from slavery. And the 
battle of the future is going to be a battle with Mam- 
mon. 

What counterfeiting is in commerce, what forgery is 
in public affairs, what treason is in government, that ex- 
actly, and in a more infamous form, is every method by 
which violence is done to the ballot-box. 

It is not the ignorant men alone that are dangerous, 
but the men who neglect to use or who abuse the ballot. 
It is the top of society that threatens to kill us, and not 
the bottom only. 

That can not be a healthy condition in which a few 
prosper and the great mass are drudges. 

The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is 
government. 

Put into heaven a despot, and the earth will swarm 
with despots. 

Unless there is secular teaching in the pulpit, there 
never will be constitutional liberty. 

The firm skull must conform to the growth of the 
brain, the softest mass in the whole body ; so laws and 
institutions must adapt themselves to the growths of the 
national character. 



Political, 



6 7 



There is no calamity that can befall the exterior 
fabric of society so great as benumbing the national con- 
science, deadening the spirit of humanity, and teach- 
ing men to be contented with the degradation of man- 
kind. 

No people are so easy to govern as the intelligent, 
and none are so hard to govern as the ignorant. 

The young and enterprising immigrants fall into this 
American people as drops of fresh rain fall into the 
ocean, and in a minute they are salt. A million men 
dropping into our midst do not change the color or the 
taste of the nation. 

Every man who has the elective franchise is not a 
mere private citizen, but is part and parcel of that gov- 
ernment itself. 

In Europe orders of nobility withstand the plutoc- 
racy ; but wealth in the United States is dangerous, be- 
cause there is nothing else so potent. 

All that the wisest men have been able to devise has 
not been equal to the instincts of the common people 
in respect to all subjects belonging to the great mass of 
men. 

The common schools bind together the people as they 
never can be bound together by exterior appliances. The 
nation must be held together by elective affinity, or else 
it will be disintegrated and scattered. 

" The spread of democracy " is only a phrase indicat- 
ing that the whole population of nations is becoming in- 
telligent enough to exert an influence upon public policy 
and public affairs. 



68 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



Intelligence in a commonwealth is the only condition 
of the stability of that commonwealth. 

The minds of the common people are united in this 
conviction, that governments that derive their powers, 
not from the governed, but from the ruling class, are in- 
expedient and mischievous. 

Christian institutions should, in spirit and in power, be 
competent to the wants of the lowest and of the neediest 
in society. 

We have an order of nobility in the United States. 
We call it the common people. We believe it to be the 
most sublime order of nobility that the world has ever 
seen. 

In America there is not one single element of civili- 
zation that is not made to depend, in the end, upon pub- 
lic opinion. 

The condition of the common people always meas- 
ures the position of any nation on the scale of civiliza- 
tion. The condition of work always measures the char- 
acter of the common people. 

Public sentiment is like a battery, which protects the 
city that is behind it, but sweeps with destruction all 
the plain that is before it. 

A great common people built up in thrift, honor, 
purity, faith, and piety, express the religious ideas of 
an age better than can the costliest and most skillfully 
wrought architecture. 

Learning, to be of much use, must have a tendency to 
spread itself among the common people. 



Political. 



6 9 



The masses against the classes, the world over. 

The universal brain is showing itself to be mightier 
than the class-brain. The crowned head must give way 
to the thinking head of the millions. 

All things work for the welfare, the rights, the edu- 
cation, the empowering of the masses of men, or the 
common people. 

Nothing in this country can flourish that does not be- 
long to the whole people. 

God's hand, like a sign-board, is pointing toward de- 
mocracy, and saying to the nations of the earth, " This 
is the way : walk ye in it." 

Public sentiment is to public officers what water is to 
the wheel of the mill. 

Self-government by the whole people is the teleologic 
idea. The republican form of government is the noblest 
and the best, as it is the latest. 

Sunday is the common people's great liberty-day, 
and they are bound to see to it that work does not come 
into it. 

Oregon pines are three hundred feet high — how soli- 
tary their tops must be ! — but they start from the same 
place that the moss does. 

Christ spoke most of the masses clinging to the edge 
of life, and straining all their nerves to keep from slip- 
ping off. 

Common things are dearer to Christ than the refined 
and exclusive evolvements of culture. 



jo Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

When a nation's young men are conservative, its fu- 
neral-bell is already rung. 

The man that can thunder one moment, and shed 
tears the next ; the man that knows how to be gentle 
and sweet, that stands up for the truth and is patient, 
who is not imbittered — he is the true reformer. 

The longer anything is to endure, the longer it is apt 
to be in being organized. 

Every American citizen is by birth a sworn officer of 
state. Every man is a policeman. 

Next to the obligations which men owe to God in 
spiritual religion, are those which they owe to the state 
in civil matters. Men are bound to keep the state right 
and pure, and the administration of it true. 

Every man owes himself to the state, and all his 
powers, to be held according to the law of gospel 
benevolence for the public good. 

The mere fact of laws and institutions, which are but 
clasps, and bands, and instruments, does not change the 
fact that the state means men, not machinery. 

It is not so much what the hand does as what the 
hand has in it of reserved force to do, that makes the 
capable man and the enduring state. 

No craven-hearted man was ever fit to be a citizen. 
Courage is the source of patriotism. 

Civilization means the recession of passional and 
material life, and the development of social and moral 
life. Reason is but the instrument by which this work 
is accomplished. 



Liberty. 



7i 



The real democratic American idea is, not that every 
man shall be on a level with every other man, but that 
every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, 
without hindrance. 

There is nothing in the world harder to take, unless 
one is born again, than democracy ; for it is essentially 
the seeing of God in men. 

A man without a vote is in this land like a man with- 
out a hand. 



LIBERTY. 

Liberty is the soul's right to breathe, and, when it 
can not take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight. 
Without liberty man is in a syncope. 

There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty 
is the right to do what they please, instead of the right 
of doing that which is lawful and best. 

God has given to men the great truths of liberty and 
equality, which are like mothers' breasts, carrying food 
for ages. 

No tyranny ought to be endured which makes free 
speech dangerous. 

The literature of England has been a fountain of lib- 
erty to Europe and the world. 

Every time an iron muscle is invented, it gives eman- 
cipation to human muscle. 



72 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



Free speech is to a great people what winds are to 
oceans and malarial regions, which waft away the germs 
of disease, and bring new elements of health. 

Liberty comes with Christianity, because Christianity 
develops and strengthens the mass of men. 

There is no liberty to men whose passions are stronger 
than their religious feelings'; there is no liberty to men 
in whom ignorance predominates over knowledge ; there 
is no liberty to men who know not how to govern them- 
selves. 

When you have augmented the individual power of 
the race, you have destroyed the throne and the tyrant. 

The tidal wave of God's providence is carrying lib- 
erty throughout the globe. 

Make men large and strong, and tyranny will bank- 
rupt itself in making shackles for them. 



WEALTH. 

It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich or 
poor according to what he is, not according to what he 
has. 

Men cheerfully give half their life — coiling it in 
every way, tying it in all manner of knots, sending it as 
an arrow, swinging it as the hammer swings on the 
anvil — for a little property. 



Wealth. 



73 



What one gets for nothing is the least value of any- 
thing. What one earns is all value. 

Riches are not an end of life but an instrument of 
life. 

Avarice grinds a man like emery. 

Old, corrugated wretches may be seen who have spent 
their whole lives in the violation of faith and trust, and, 
hateful and hating, have made themselves rich at last, to 
die as a viper dies that stings itself. 

A man can no more make money suddenly and largely, 
and be unharmed by it, than one could suddenly grow 
from a child's stature to a man's without harm. 

Money is like snow. If it is blown into drifts, it 
blocks up the highway, and nobody can travel; but, if it 
is diffused over all the ground, it facilitates every man's 
travel. 

Individual men can prosper without wealth, but com- 
munities can not. Wealth may not produce civilization, 
but civilization produces money. 

Communities are blest in the proportion in which 
money is diffused through the whole range of population. 

Money in the hands of one or two men is like a dung- 
heap in a barn-yard. So long as it lies in a mass, it does 
no good ; but, if it is only spread out evenly on the 
land, everything will grow. 

In the long run, the reason why men who are rich are 
honored is, that their riches stand for integrity, for skill, 
for moral and social excellence. Wealth is generically 
the exponent of these qualities in men. 
7 



74 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

Ten men go crazy after money where one man goes 
crazy in religious excitements. 

There is nothing in this world so hideous as costly 
apparel so worn that men may not know that a beggar's 
bones are carried under it. 

As the cream abandons the milk from which it took 
its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, 
because they are richer than those around about them, 
separate themselves, and all mankind below them they 
regard as skim-milk. 

The having of riches is not so much to be desired 
as the not having poverty. It is what riches cut off as 
well as what they add that constitutes much of their 
value. 

The production of wealth has been the divine civil- 
izer. Earning is often better for man than using. 

A rich man's pocket ought to be like an old-fashioned 
well with two buckets — one constantly coming up full, 
the other constantly going down to get full. 

Men who have riches should be patriotic and honor 
the government that protects them. Every just and good 
man who has money ought to call the tax-paying day his 
thanks giving- day. 

Nowhere else does wealth so directly point toward 
virtue in morality and spirituality in religion as in 
America. 

The u upper class," as they style themselves, are the 
flies of humanity ; the world would be benefited if some 
great fan could sweep them from the world. 



Wealth. 



75 



It is money that is working that keeps bright, and it 
is money that is working that keeps men bright. 

No community can develop into permanent civiliza- 
tion unless it has power ministered to it very largely 
through the civilizing influences of wealth. 

If it were not for the holes in the pocket, we should 
all be rich. A pocket is like a cistern, a small leak at 
the bottom is worse than a large pump at the top. 

The conscience of stock-dealers needs quinine. 

A man who deliberately proposes to gain wealth with- 
out earning it by some substantial equivalent rendered 
to the community, is a thief. 

Softness of ease, luxuries, scope and power of wealth, 
are as deadly enemies as can intrench the heart, unless 
we extract the quality of selfishness from them. 

No nation can bear wealth that is not intelligent first. 

Where God has given a man wealth, and where he 
has more money than is required for the necessaries of 
life, he is bound to live better than he otherwise could. 

A man's wealth is like the snow-houses the boys built 
in the olden time on high drifts. No sooner had the 
sun come forth than the houses melted, and the foun- 
dations slipped from under them. 

Property must be the product of human intelligence 
to give it value. All property has brains in it. 

The first element that required the development of 
property was hunger. A man's stomach says to him, 
" Go to work ! " 



76 Proverbs fro??i Plymouth Ptdpit. 



To develop even the lower forms of property re- 
quires thought and brain. 

Men should build fine houses, and have them well 
proportioned ; they should have beautiful furniture, and 
beautiful men and women should use them. It is not 
selfish. 

A man has a right to a large installment of the prop- 
erty he has raised around himself. 

If a man should give all his money to the heathen, 
in a year or two he would be a heathen himself. 

Some of God's noblest sons will be taken from those 
who know how to take wealth with all its temptations, 

and maintain godliness therewith. 

Our dangerous class is not at the bottom, it is near 
the top, of society. Riches without law are more dan- 
gerous than is poverty without law. 

Through the directories of two or three railroads the 
money power of America may set at defiance all control, 
and dictate to Legislatures the laws, and to the people 
their policies. 

Wealth held by a class and used ambitiously becomes 
as despotic as an absolute monarchy, and has in its 
hands manners, customs, laws, institutions, and govern- 
ments themselves. 

Wealth under Divine Providence is a great economic 
power for civilizing nations. 

Poverty is very good in poems, but it is very bad in 
a house. It is very good in maxims and in sermons, but 
it is very bad in practical life. 



Wealth. 



77 



If you build riches, take care : there must be in the 
firm one other name — God. 

Almost every evil which environs the path to wealth 
springs from that criminal haste which substitutes 
adroitness for industry, and trick for toil. 

Men like money, but they do not care for those who 
scrape it together. A man that is a mere muck-rake 
has nothing in him that men want to remember. 

No man amasses riches which stay with him, who 
does not do it by the exercise of sterling qualities. 

Self-culture and refinement are right, but do not 
build your banqueting-hall so that you can not see the 
beggar full of sores who lies at your door. 

It is a duty to be rich, if God has armed a man with 
the faculties of wealth-making — with the power of amass- 
ing property. 

Wealth in activity — capital with all its friction — is far 
safer than invested wealth lying dead. 

God when he created riches did not let it go single. 
He married it, and Care is the husband. Since the 
world began, there has been a wedding between Care and 
Riches. 

The man who has that ethereal digestion by which 
to convert coarse to fine, bitter to sweet, acid to sugar — 
he is the man that is rich. He is the man who owns all 
things and everybody. 

There is no enmity between riches and God : he 
made them. 



78 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



Wealth created without spot or blemish is an honest 
man's peerage, and to be proud of it is his right. 



THE POOR. 

A Christianity which will not help those who are 
struggling from the bottom to the top of society, needs 
another Christ to die for it. 

The two poorest men in the world are buckled to- 
gether at the opposite sides of the circle. The man 
who has so much money that he does not know what to 
do with it and the man who has no money at all touch 
each other, as you will find ; and one is about as poor 
as the other. 

Poverty is never by the grace of God in the estima- 
tion of a New-Englander. It comes to him by post 
from the other direction. 

You will seldom find in New England a saint in a 
ragged coat and with clouted shoes. It is contrary to 
the drift of centuries of teaching. 

Inventions and mechanic arts are not working half 
so much for the rich, the strong, and the wise, as they 
are for the poor, the weak, and the ignorant. 

The poor man with industry is happier than the rich 
man in idleness ; for labor makes the one more manly, 
and riches unman the other. 



The Press. 



79 



When Christianity gives to the poor, it is bound to 
give them the best it has. 

God dips the pen of the recording angel very near to 
the mud-puddle. God selects the white linen of many 
a saint very near to rags. God selects the gold out of 
which he will build the pavement of the hereafter very 
near to the filth and the dirt of this world. 

God's disposition and government take in the great 
under-class of men. 

You can not sift out the poor from the community. 
The poor are indispensable to the rich. 

In former times they built cathedrals, and let men 
live in mud hovels. We build no cathedrals, and our 
poor men live in good houses. 

The poorest and the least of mankind are being 
swept on in the current of the Gulf Stream of divine love 
and mercy. 



THE PRESS. 

To be calm, to be just, and then, without fear or favor, 
discriminatingly but intensely to mark and brand in- 
iquity, and to defend, on the other hand, righteousness 
and virtue — this is to make a newspaper a sublime power 
over the community. 

The most efficacious secular book that ever was pub- 
lished in America is the newspaper. 



So Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

Men are covered over with papers, novels, and books, 
as fences are covered with vines and weeds. 

A man is bound to have a knowledge of current 
events, which no man can have who does not read the 
newspapers. 

Newspapers are the schoolmasters of the common 
people. That endless book, the newspaper, is our na- 
tional glory. 

Newspapers are to the body politic what arteries are 
to the human body, their function being to carry blood 
and sustenance and repair to every part of the body. 

The newspaper is a greater treasure to the people 
than uncounted millions of gold. 

The newspaper is one of those divine developments 
in Providence which characterize the present age, and 
with all its weaknesses and imperfections is an unmeas- 
ured blessing. 

It is necessary, if one would read aright, that he 
should read at least two newspapers, representing both 
sides of important subjects. 

The advertisements in a newspaper are more full of 
knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or 
community than the editorial columns are. 

Never skip the market reports, the shipping news, or 
the advertisements in a newspaper. Read them, even if 
your business does not require it. 

All that is vital, and manly, and progressive, can be 
found out by a judicious use of the newspapers day by 
day. 



Education. 



81 



Nowhere else can one find so miscellaneous, so vari- 
ous, an amount of knowledge as is contained in a good 
newspaper. 

Reading is a dissuasion from immorality. Reading 
stands in the place of company. 

A book is a garden ; a book is an orchard ; a book is 
a storehouse ; a book is a party. It is company by the 
way ; it is a counselor ; it is a multitude of counselors. 



EDUCATION. 

Any system of public education that will be strong 
enough to take care of the poorest and the most difficult 
to reach, will be strong enough to take care of the in- 
telligent classes. 

If we are ever to have common schools that shall en- 
list the enthusiasm of the community, they must be 
ample enough, and beautiful enough, and airy enough, 
and wholesome enough, to command the approbation of 
science, and of all who have to do with them. 

Every city should make the common school so rich, 
so large, so ample, so beautiful in its endowments, and 
so fruitful in its results, that a private school will not be 
able to live under the drip of it. 

In the education of the community there is mother- 
work, there is church-work, and there is common-school 
work. 



82 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

A child is not educated who has not physical educa- 
tion, social education, intellectual education, industrial 
education, professional education, and spiritual educa- 
tion. 

A people uneducated is like an iron mountain whose 
ore is unwrought. 

For common purposes it is no more necessary that a 
man should know three or four languages than that a 
pump should have three or four nozzles, when there is 
not any more water than can go through one. 

Never read the original if you can get a good trans- 
lation. 

Men must read for amusement as well as for knowl- 
edge. 

By those innumerable jack-screws which have been 
laid under the sills of the nation, and which we are per- 
petually turning — the common schools — we are steadily 
lifting the whole nation from the foundation, and this is 
far better than the higher education of the few. 

Men are like trees : each one must put forth the leaf 
that is created in him. 

Education is only like good culture — it changes the 
size, but not the sort. 

College learning is very much like snow ; and the 
more a man has of it the less can the soil produce. It's 
not till practical life melts it that the ground yields any- 
thing. 



Amusements. 



83 



AMUSEMENTS. 

The Church has been so fearful of amusements that 
the devil has had the care of them. 

Gambling with cards, or dice, or stocks, is all one 
thing — it is getting money without giving an equivalent 
for it. 

Life is full of amusement to an amusing man. For- 
tunate is he who has this faculty. It is more blessed 
than a garment in cold weather. 

There is nothing that so covers the nerves, nothing 
that so tempers passion and anger, nothing that is such 
a natural cure for discontent, nothing that brings men 
to such a level, and creates such fellowship, as the divine 
spirit of mirth. 

A game of cards is as innocent as a game of check- 
ers ; but, if you sit and play a game of cards, you may 
give young people of loose instruction and narrow views 
the impression that if they may play cards they may 
gamble and drink wine, and give way to dissipation in a 
multitude of ways. 

Merchants, business men, lawyers, ministers, all sorts 
of toiling and laboring men, have too little relaxation. 

Do not be afraid because the community teems with 
excitement. Silence and death are dreadful. 

The theatre is the door to all kinds of iniquity. 

To be infected with each particular vice in the cata- 
logue of depravity, one need go to the theatre. 



84 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 



It is the very art and education of vice to make it- 
self attractive to the young. 

As crows flock to a corn-field and vultures to their 
prey, as flies to summer sweet, so to the annual races 
flow the whole tribe of gamesters and pleasure-lovers. 

Hell is populated with the victims of harmless 
amusements. 

A gamester, as such, is the cool, calculating, essen- 
tial spirit of concentrated, avaricious selfishness. 

There is an appetite of the eye, of the ear, and of 
every sense, for which God has provided the material. 

Gayety of every degree, this side of puerile levity, 
is wholesome to the body, to the mind, and to the 
morals. 

Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments. 

God has made provision in nature, in society, and in 
the family for amusement and exhilaration enough to fill 
the heart with the perpetual sunshine of delight. 

The men who provide the popular amusements which 
delight the sensual feelings are, the world over, corrupt- 
ers of youth. 

It is astonishing how little the influence of those 
professions has been considered which exert themselves 
mainly to delight the sensual feelings of men. 

The whole race of men, whose camp is the theatre, 
the circus, the turf, or the gaming-table, is a race whose 
instinct is destruction, who live to corrupt, and live off 
of the corruption which they make. 



The Family, 85 



The theatre was disgraceful even among the heathen 
nations, and has come down with perpetual dishonor on 
its head. 

A contest for rearing the best roses is better than one 
of rearing the best horses. One might rather be vain of 
the best tulip, dahlia, ranunculus, than of the best shot. 

Children are more apt to be drawn into vice and 
dissipation by dull and stupid sobriety than by innocent 
gayety. 



Any feeling that takes a man away from his home is 
a traitor to the household. 

God's church is God's house, and God's house is 
our home ; and a Christian's home ought to be bright, 
cheerful, and happy. 

Nowhere can a man get real root-room, and spread 
out his branches till they touch the morning and the 
evening, but in his own house. 

A childless man is like a loose engine in a ship. A 
man must be bolted and screwed to the community be- 
fore he can work well for its advancement ; and there 
are no such screws and bolts as children. 

American patriotism must be a household virtue. 
The civilizing center of modern America must be home 
and the family. 
8 




THE FAMILY. 



86 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

God never gives us the light which our children 
need ; he keeps it for them. 

The child lives upon its parent's life. The child 
which has no one to suffer for it is a miserable wretch. 

A boy not trained to endure will grow Up a girl ; 
and a boy that is a girl has all a girl's weakness without 
any of her regal qualities. 

America owes more to the family than to any other 
institution. It derives more public good from it, and 
depends more upon it, than any other nation, for educa- 
tion, for virtue, and for internal defense against wasting 
evils. 

True republican commonwealths grow out of the 
power which is generated only in the Christian house- 
hold. 

The northern races are the races of home habits. 

The frost-line marks the realm of republicanism. 
Where men do not live in the house, summer or winter, 
monarchy will prevail. 

It is not with the heart as it is with the purse. So- 
ciety is better off where riches are not concentrated 
but diffused. But the heart needs concentration in the 
household. 

Early marriages are permanent moralities, and de- 
ferred marriages are temptations to wickedness. 

Woe be to that society in which the customs and the 
manners of the times put off, beyond the period of ro- 
mance and affiancing, the weddkig ! 



The Family. 



87 



Pleasures sought away from home should be taken, 
as sweetmeats are, not as food, but as occasional mouth- 
fuls. 

It is solitary pleasures that demoralize men. It is 
solitary enjoyment out of the family that corrupts the 
household. The family should seek its outside pleas- 
ures together. 

In a loving Christian family, which is the true type 
of a generous commonwealth, all things gravitate to the 
cradle. 

Ordinarily, children are very much what their parents 
make them. 

Many and many a parent will rise up in amazement 
in the last day to hear the Judge declare, " The ruin of 
your child I lay at your door ! " 

When a child is born into the world, God draws his 
hand out from near to his own heart, and lends some- 
thing of himself to the parent, and says, " Keep it till I 
come." 

It should never be forgotten that our servants are 
just like us in conscience, sympathy, love, hope, ambi- 
tion, pride, and frequently in delicacy of feeling. 

Home should be an oratorio of the memory, sing- 
ing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old 
remembered joy. 

No man has a right to bring up his children without 
surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy 
them. 



88 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



In this great whirligig of a world, there is nothing 
stranger than the mating and mismating of men and 
women. 

When the word "home " is spoken, it is as though a 
bee-hive were struck, and a thousand bees had begun to 
buzz and hum music in the mind. 

There is nothing more refined or fuller of sweet sug- 
gestion than the table, which signifies the blessings of 
the household. 

The cradle empty blesses us more than the cradle 
full. 

God has been represented to us chiefly in the Bible, 
not by Nature, not by civil governments, but by the do- 
mestic relations of men in the family. 

We never know the love of our parents for us till we 
have become parents. 

A man never has good luck who has a bad wife. 

To make the destruction of a child sure, give him 
unwatched liberty after dark. 

No young person should consider it an advantage to 
get rid of parental supervision and care. No one ever 
finds another friend who has borne as much for him, or 
done as much for him, as his father or mother. 

The family is the true church ; the best expounder 
of the truths of Christianity. 

Birds finish the nest with their own breast, so it is 
the bosom that makes the home, and not the bill or 
the claw. 



The Family, 89 

The law of the household, the law of association, 
must be kindness. 

The woman that sings hymns over the cradle that 
her child may learn the eternal songs of heaven, is doing 
a higher work than if she were like Jenny Lind, and 
sang on the concert stage. 

Power comes with the passions — with the basilar 
faculties. A child is to be trained in them, and then 
they will not be dangerous. 

In family government men govern that they may be 
done governing just as soon as they can. 

A true Christian woman administering in the house- 
hold presents the best conception of moral government, 
of mediatorial work, of atoning love, possible to be 
presented on earth. 

Of all creatures, there is not one that has a better 
right to be a hedgehog than a hedgehog, but he is not a 
good neighbor, he is not a pleasant bosom-companion. 
Man should not be like this hedgehog. 

The great treasures of a dwelling are, the child's 
cradle, the grandmother's chair, the hearth and old- 
fashioned fireplace, the table, and the window. 

There is in youth a purity of character which, when 
once touched and denied, can never be restored ; a 
fringe more delicate than frost-work, and which, when 
torn and broken, can never be re-embroidered. 

In the family, happiness is in the ratio in which each 
is serving the others, seeking one another's good, and 
bearing one another's burdens. 



90 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

A man's house ought to be a magazine of kindness. 

The very poorest benefit a man can confer upon his 
wife and children is to make them outwardly rich, and 
inwardly disgraced, by a course which he would not like 
to talk about, or have them talk about. 

Blessed is the household which makes every child 
feel that something of the prosperity of the family de- 
pends upon its industry. 

Every family goes through drill and does not know 
what God is doing with it. 

The most wonderful book that could be written 
would be a book written by an angel recording a faith- 
ful mother's thought from the time she first hears the 
cry of her child, and knows that it is born into the 
world. 

In the family the altar is the cradle, and the greater 
serve the less. 

To rush heedlessly into marriage, to take upon one's 
self all the obligations implied in it in a light-hearted 
spirit, is sacrilege. 

When men enter into the state of marriage, they 
stand nearest to God. 

If there be any one whose power is in beauty, in 
purity, in goodness, it is a woman. It is a marvel that 
every woman is not a Christian. 

Men are not to take care of their own children 
alone ; every man is bound to see that the community 
is educated. 



The Family, 91 



No woman can set herself against public opinion, in 
favor of an immoral sport, without being herself im- 
moral. 

There is not on earth so base a knave as the man 
who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he 
can not or ought not to requite it. 

There is not a street in Brooklyn in which there are 
not heroic women, far more heroic than those of olden 
times. 

A woman made of a woman is God's noblest work ; 
but a woman made of a man is his meanest work. 

People may talk about the equality of the sexes ! 
They are not equal. The silent smile of a sensible, 
loving woman will vanquish ten men. 

Woe be to the man who has never had a sister, a 
wife, or a mother, who was to him a perpetual suggestion 
of the nobleness, the sweetness, and the delicacy of love ! 

The devil's broadsword in this world has often been 
the needle with which a woman sews to earn her daily 
bread. The needle has slain more than the sword of 
war. 

Woman began at zero, and has through ages slowly 
unfolded and risen. Each age has protested against 
growth as unsexing woman. 

Men might spin, and churn, and knit, and sew, and 
cook, and rock the cradle for a hundred generations, 
and not be women. And woman will not become man 
by external occupations. God's colors do not wash out : 
sex is dyed in the wool. 



92 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

Woman to-day, taxed, punished, restrained in all 
higher industries, asks that vote which carries with it 
control of circumstances. 

Purity, clinging love, devotion, trust, prudence, wis- 
dom, devoutness, disinterested sympathy, are woman's 
regnant qualities. 

The mother's heart is the child's school-room. 

A true mother never lives so little in the present as 
when by the side of the cradle. Her thoughts follow 
the imagined future of her child. The old ark never 
made such voyage as the cradle daily makes. 

With every child we lose we see deeper into life, as 
with every added lens we pierce farther the sky. 

A mother is as different from anything else that God 
ever thought of, as can possibly be. She is a distinct 
and individual creation. 

When God thought of Mother, he must have laughed 
with satisfaction, and framed it quickly — so rich, so 
deep, so divine, so full of soul, power and beauty was 
the conception ! 

There is no slave out of heaven like a loving woman ; 
and, of all loving women, there is no such slave as a 
mother. 

A mother has, perhaps, the hardest earthly lot. And 
yet no mother worthy of the name ever gave herself 
thoroughly for her child who did not feel that, after all, 
she reaped what she had sown. 

A mother's prayers, silent and gentle, can never miss 
the road to the throne of all bounty. 



The Family. 



93 



Executors are an excellent class of men ; but, after 
all, each man had better be his own executor, and settle 
his own affairs before he goes out of life, and keep them 
well settled. 

Some women cling to their own houses like the honey- 
suckle over the door, yet, like it, fill all the region with 
the subtile fragrance of their goodness. 

Well-married, a man is winged — ill-matched, he is 
shackled. 

A family bears to the community the relation which 
limbs and organs do to the human body. 

Whoever makes home seem to the young dearer and 
more happy, is a public benefactor. 

Nothing is more remote from selfishness than gener- 
ous expenditure in building up a home, and enriching it 
with all that shall make it beautiful without and lovely 
within. 

He that actually rears good citizens presents to the 
state better properties — far nobler than ample funds or 
costly buildings. 

Few places on earth are so near to heaven as where 
Christian wives and mothers pray for their families. 

No man is fit to keep house who is not fit to defend 
it with his right hand and arm, with anything that he 
can seize. 



94 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



CHILDREN. 

A boy is a piece of existence quite separate from all 
things else, and deserves separate chapters in the nat- 
ural history of man. The real lives of boys are yet to be 
written. 

The piety of impossible boys is monstrous. A man's 
experience stuffed into a little boy is simply monstrous. 
The world is soundly skeptical of the whole school of 
juvenile pdti-de-foie-gras piety. 

The most worthless of all persons are those lily-handed 
boys who have been brought up without being taught to 
do anything for themselves. 

Boys have a period of mischief as much as they have 
measles or chicken-pox. 

Foundlings and orphans, under public charitable 
charge, are more apt to become vicious than other chil- 
dren. 

The true, idea of self-restraint is to let a child vent- 
ure. A child's mistakes are often better than its no- 
mistakes. 

The experience of life shows that, while poverty has 
its disadvantages, moderate conditions are a thousand 
times more advantageous than conditions of great wealth 
for children. 

That energy which makes a child hard to manage is 
the energy which afterward makes him a manager of life. 

The divine spirit comes more quickly to children than 
to others. 



Children. 



95 



Blessed are those children that learn by the hard way 
of life what every one must learn first or last, or go 
ashore a wreck — namely, self-restraint. 

Where a child is urged by its mother's teaching and 
its mother's affection to love goodness, purity, spiritual 
excellence, and takes to it with all its little heart — that is 
conversion. 

The world will never become a Christian world until 
the cradle is a sanctuary, and the mother a minister, and, 
day in and out, the child is brought up to manhood in 
the nurture and admonition of the Lord. 

If unkind and unjust words were needles and pins 
in some men's families, the children would be like pin- 
cushions, stuck completely full of them. 

Children should grow up as agreeably good as thor- 
oughly good. 

There is not a neglected brat in all the purlieus of 
vice, there is not an uncombed, unwashed, untaught 
child that has not some angel heart that is pitying it 
in the heaven above. 

Children are not to be brought up for our own pride 
and profit, not even for the child's own good simply, but 
for its citizenship in the coming world. 

No orator, no singer, no artist-worker, is to be com- 
pared with the mother who is carving the image of God 
in the soul of her little child. 

Early conversions are to be expected, but not early 
saintships. There is nothing more monstrous than a 
little five-year-old Puritan. 



g6 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



The lower life of every child is selfishness, and self- 
ishness is to be taught benevolence. 

The art of putting down a feeling in a child consists 
in the art of raising up another one that will put it down. 
If a child is peevish, awaken kind and benevolent feelings. 

Children ought to be brought up to ask as little as 
possible, and to give as much as possible, to despise 
charity, to give an equivalent for all they receive. 

The ministering angel of children is the favorite in 
heaven, and stands in the presence of his Sovereign, and 
is in power. 

Every one of the traits of higher manhood in adults 
springs from the drill and the training which little chil- 
dren require and inspire. 

Children are not to be taught, but to be trained : to 
teach a child is to give him ideas ; to train him is to 
enable him to reduce those ideas to practice. 

No willow was ever woven more easily to form a 
basket than children may be influenced in right ways by 
wise parents. 

The chances are nine hundred and ninety-nine in a 
thousand that, if parents desire to bring up their children 
right, and devote themselves to fulfilling that desire, they 
will succeed. 

Every child is born without any walk in him. Al- 
though he has feet, he can not walk. Every child is 
born without any work in him. He has a hand, but 
there is no work in it. By training, the foot and the 
hand are to be made capable of walking and working. 



Children. 



97 



The girl who is never allowed to sew, all of whose 
clothes are made for her and put on till she is ten, twelve, 
fifteen, or eighteen years of age, is spoiled. 

A child should not only be taught but trained. 
Training him is drilling him in what he does until he has 
formed the habit of doing it. 

Every village in the United States has in it the worst 
children in the world. 

In children there is the animal period, the brute 
period, the deceitful period, the fox period, the wolf 
period, the serpent period. 

A man's sins not only curse him, deteriorating him, 
but they follow the channels of natural love, and roll 
over in mildew on the child. The drinking-man has a 
drunken babe ; and the vicious man has an enervated 
child ; and the man that has sucked dry the fountain 
of intelligence, the nervous system, has paralytic or 
imbecile children. 

A babe is nothing but a bundle of possibilities. 

Story-hunger in children is even more urgent than 
bread-hunger. 

If every child might live the life predestined in a 
mother's heart, all the way from the cradle to the coffin, 
he would walk upon a beam of light, and shine in 
glory. 



9S Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



MORALS. 

It is the nature of vice or crime that it takes away 
moral stamina. 

A man that has not more truth, more honesty, more 
purity than the law requires, is scarcely fit to be ranked 
among our fellow-men. 

One of the striking peculiarities of Christ's teaching, 
and the teachings of those who were inspired by him, 
was the unconditional requisition of moral purity. The 
very first step in a religious life was one of personal 
purif ca::on. 

While sense is the source of physical or scientific 
knowledge, disposition is the source of the knowledge 
of moral truth. 

The pain or pleasure of the human mind is depend- 
ent upon external condition to such a degree, that one 
means of reaching men, even with moral truth, is to con- 
trol their physical wants. 

As crimes are evils against the organized forms of 
society, so vices are evils against the unorganized forms 
of society. 

Wickedness goes to great lengths and depths where 
it is not checked and restrained by the free and contin- 
uous expression of the indignation of good men. 

The most hateful evil in the world is the evil that 
dresses itself in such a way that men can not hate it 
The men that make wickedness beautiful are the most 
utterly to be hated. 



Morals. 



99 



If vice would make itself tolerable, it asks art to 
embellish it ; and, as soon as art embellishes it, then the 
place of orgies and dissipations, the place of boundless 
corruption, the place where deceits and cheatings are 
organized, spreads tables with munificence. 

Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they 
can no more flourish than could a plant growing under 
the shade and drip of trees. 

When you see a man given to licentious indulgence, 
be sure that he will come to want a crust. 

Spirituality without morality is rootless ; and moral- 
ity without spirituality is blossomless and fruitless. 

All men are full of dogs. Temper is a gnarly cur ; 
destructiveness is a bull-dog ; combativeness is a hound, 
that runs and barks and bites. 

There never was a liar that had not a spot in him 
where he could not help admiring truth. 

We have a partnership in the conduct of wicked men, 
unless we have exhausted proper and permissible means 
of forestalling and preventing it. 

When men stand for a moral principle, their troubles 
are not a presumption that they are in the wrong. 

Conscience and good-nature can work a hundred- 
fold faster and better than conscience alone. 

The fear of doing right is the grand treason in times 
of danger. 

The world's fight is the fight between conscience and 
moral purity and the animal that is in man. 



ioo Proverbs from Plymouth PulpiL 



If men govern the animal that is within them, on 
which the soul sits astride, like the rider upon his steed, 
then they are self-governed. 

No man has a right to hide from God's battle, or to 
hold back his hand from the proper blow when the time 
calls him. 

All true conflict should aim at peace. The plow is a 
great disturber of the spring, and yet it is the father of 
the sickle. 

If you create a moral public sentiment, then you have 
a power by which to enforce moral lessons. 

A man that puts himself on the ground of moral 
principle, if the whole world be against him, is mightier 
than all of them. A man ought not to fear being in 
minorities, so that minorities are based upon principles. 

The friend' instructs and elevates. The friendship 
of one who breathes malaria into your system, who de- 
grades and lowers you, is foul, pernicious, deadly. 

What is just is more to us as we grow older. Justice 
is never so slender to us as when we first practice it. 

What the compass is to navigation, that is moral 
principle to our affairs. We need not fear shipwreck 
when God is the pilot. 

Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for 
the ages. 

There is not a single one of the relationships of life 
that could be used as the profane use the name of God, 
except by the most degraded of men. 



Morals. 



101 



The little coward oaths are feeders to profane oaths. 

A man has no more right to swear in your ear than 
he has to insult your father and mother. 

It essentially lowers a man's being to be a profane 
swearer ; it takes the temper out of a man's honor. 

Profane swearing is the habit of using vulgarly and 
grossly the most sacred thoughts of the human mind. 

An impure man is every good man's enemy. 

The plague is mercy, the cholera is love, the dead- 
liest fever is refreshment to man's body, in comparison 
with the libertine. 

The wheel, the rack, the bed of knives, the roasting 
fire, the brazen room slowly heated, the slivers driven 
under the nails, the hot pincers, are nothing to the 
agonies of the last days of licentious vice. 

The difference between cunning and wisdom is the 
difference between acting by the certain and immutable 
laws of Nature and acting by the shifts of temporary 
expedients. 

Men who act under dishonest passions are like men 
riding fierce horses : they can not stop when they will, 
and they ride to ruin. 

The mind has no kitchen to do its dirty work in 
while the parlor remains clean. 

No one should do for another man what he would 
not do for himself. 

A violation of moral principle can not so be dressed 
up as to make it other than vulgar. 



102 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



It is little meannesses, selfishnesses, and impurities 
that steal with muffled tread, that ruin most men. 

Moral law is absolutely universal, and moral penalty 
when law is broken is inevitable. 

No man can be glowingly like an angel of truth till 
he has gone to school to learn how. And so in regard 
to honesty and purity. Men must grow up into them 
little by little. 

Many men do not believe in allopathic stealing, but 
they do in homoeopathic. 

Some men are like lighthouses built well at the bot- 
tom and all the way up. All right, only they have no 
lantern, and no light — no moral faculties. 

There is nothing in the world that seems so profitable 
as lying and stealing ; so profitable in the beginning, 
but so sure to be hit by God's lightning at the end. 

Morality is often grace working out into a noble life- 
form. 

Good men are not those who now and then do a 
good act, but men who join one good act to another. It 
is men the whole tendency of whose lives is the produc- 
tion of good things, kind things, right things. 

Little lies are very dangerous, because there are so 
many of them, and because each one of them scours 
upon the character as diamond-pointed. 

Honesty in man and honesty in his work is what 
must be secured in society, or society will never be 
Christianized. 



Morals. 



103 



The great want of society to-day is the habit of ad- 
hering to absolute truth and reliable honesty. 

What are called " minor " morals are foundation 
morals. 

Whenever men make up their minds to lie and cheat, 
they are food for tyrants. 

If virtue consisted in nots, how virtuous the world 
might be ! Virtue is not a negative quality. 

Modern civilization is based upon morals. The 
civilization of former times lacked a general moral basis. 

While morals have followed refinement, refinement 
has always been the product of the imagination — an 
imagination that lifted the ideals of things. 

Christ denounced the selfishness of culture as less 
excusable and more guilty than that of lust or passion. 

A man that has lost moral sense is like a man in 
battle with both of his legs shot off : he has nothing to 
stand on. 

Conscience and law are sworn friends. But love 
makes performance of right so quick and spontaneous 
that law is always behindhand. 

Morality without spirituality has no roots. It be- 
comes a thing of custom, changeable, transient, and 
optional. 

Every immoderate draft which is made by the appe- 
tites and passions is so much sent forward to be cashed 
in old age. 



io4 Proverbs front Plymouth Pulpit. 



You are not at liberty to execute a good plan with 
bad instruments. 

There are crimes that, like frost on flowers, in one 
single night destroy character and reputation ; there are 
vices that, like freshets, sweep everything before them. 

Xo man who buys or borrows and does not pay, and 
does not care whether he pays or not, is a gentleman, no 
matter how witty or gay or fine he may be. 

Nothing will save a nation unless the fathers and 
mothers teach the boys in their families to accept the 
truth, and to love it ; to hate lies, and to be scrupulously 
honest ; and to make truth and honesty part and parcel 
of honor ; and to govern their appetites and passions, and 
to respect their neighbors. 

Men believe in " sagacity," " shrewdness," which is 
the baptized name for cunning. They believe in avarice, 
which is too often called " laudable enterprise." They 
believe in dealing with things as they find them with 
"spirit," by which they mean anger. 

The working plan of reformation as laid down in the 
Bible is that right-doing must cure wrong-doing. 

All that we need to exclude us from the advantages 
of fruitful, enterprising industry is — not to be industri- 
ous. 

You can not make any man understand a moral 
quality who has not had some experience in that moral 
quality. 



Truth. 



105 



TRUTH. 

A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it. The 
worst lies are those whose blade is false, but whose 
handle is true. 

A man in the right, with God on his side, is in the 
majority, though he be alone; for God is multitudinous 
above all the populations of the earth. 

Defeat is a school in which truth always grows 
strong. 

Men never make truths ; they only recognize the 
value of this currency of God. They find truths, as men 
sometimes find bills, in the street, and only recognize the 
value of that which other persons have drawn. 

Every man that has the truth owes it to all man- 
kind. 

Thank God for books ! And yet thank God that the 
great realm of truth lies yet outside of books, too vast 
to be mastered by types or imprisoned in libraries. 

There is tonic in the things that men do not love to 
hear, and there is damnation in the things that wicked 
men love to hear. 

The key-note of the gospel as a reformatory literature 
is — speaking the truth in love. 

Talk living and die talking of God's truth, and make 
other men talk. The only risk is in reticence. 

No man rides so high and in such good company as 
the man that allies himself to a truth that God loves and 
man hates. 



io6 Proverbs from Plymouth PulpiL 



Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie ; he has 
to, to make the lie good for anything. 

It is more natural for a man to tell the truth than to 
lie ; but, it must be admitted, there is some lying going 
on in the world ! 

No man can work harmoniously with men whom he 
does not believe when they speak to him. We naturally 
exclude the untrustworthy lip. Men must be honest, at 
any rate among themselves. 

The presumption is, that the great mass of men work- 
ing together are truth-speakers. If they are not, they 
have to make believe that they are. 

Many yet are the secret truths of God which will be 
unfolded as they are needed. 

All truth is equilibrated. Pushing any truth out very 
far, you are met by a counter-truth. 

Truth is the bread of a noble manhood ; lies are the 
bad food that carries disease with it everywhere through 
the whole economy. 

Nobody ever sees truth except in fragments. 

There is nothing that science doubts so much as it 
does the senses. We do not yet know how to use the 
eye, the ear, or the hand, so that they shall be infallible. 

The test of fundamental truth is its power to pro- 
duce superior manhood; and the test of an orthodox 
church is its power to produce the most men of the 
largest caliber from generation to generation, transform- 
ing society and bringing up the averages. 



Taste. 107 

Truth is not developed as a ripe thing. It grows as 
fruit grows, just as small, and green, and sour ; and it 
gradually ripens, just as the fruit does, and becomes fair 
and beautiful. We are now in the greenness of science. 



TASTE. 

The French people imagine themselves to be the 
modern Greeks. They are — in just the same way that 
swallows are eagles. They have all the Greek sensuous- 
ness, but they lack the abstract reasoning which the 
Greeks had. 

In New England is found the love of pure reason, 
which distinguished the Greek nation even more than its 
art genius. 

There is nothing that a New-Englander so nearly 
worships as an argument. 

A patch of flowers in a new country signifies kind 
people, clean beds, and good bread. 

The plainest row of books that cloth or paper ever 
covered is more significant of refinement than the most 
elaborately carved furniture. 

All virtues and graces go for nothing in a slattern. 

Beauty may be said to be God's trade-mark in crea- 
tion. 



108 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

An apple-tree puts to shame all the men and women 
that have attempted to dress since the world began. 

There are other kinds of hunger besides stomachic 
hunger. The hunger of the eye is not to be despised ; 
and they are to be pitied who have starvation of the 
eye. 

Works of fiction are just as wholesome as anything 
else, if they are read wholesomely. 

The very pins and rivets and clasps of Nature are 
attractive by qualities of beauty more than is necessary 
for mere utility. 

Nothing that produces constant pleasure in us can 
fail to seem beautiful. 

Some men may build their work in words, and live 
in literature ; some may shape their sense into sound, 
and live in the world's song. 

The pen is the tongue of the hand — a silent utterer 
of words for the eye. 

Nothing can make others so rich, without diminishing 
our own means, as generosity in the use of art-treasures, 
or materials of beauty. 

There can be no high civilization where there is not 
ample leisure. 

He who builds a home, and furnishes it so that it is 
a glowing center of beauty, and then administers his 
family so that it shall be an exemplar of virtue and cult- 
ure in the community, spends his money, not on him- 
self or his family, but on the community. 



Benevolence. 



109 



The hands of a giant upon the keys of an organ 
make no more music than the hands of a common man, 
for the sound is in the instrument, not in the hand that 
touches it. 

There is a great artist-faculty in every single man 
which was meant to cast out its light so that words 
should be beautiful — so that all virtues should issue 
beautifully. 

The distance between the toad and the nightingale 
is not greater than the distance between the matter-of- 
fact man and the man with a poetic nature. 



BENEVOLENCE. 

Men ought to use their refinements as the silk-worm 
uses its web. It lives to spin it, and dies that it may 
yield it for others' benefit. 

Thousands of men are like a wax-candle in a solitary 
room, which some one has lighted and placed there. It 
spends its whole life in burning itself out, and does good 
to none. 

What a man himself derives from the cunning craft 
that he possesses, is not half so important, as it is not 
half so much, as what he gives by it. 

All human trouble ought to roll itself on to the broad- 
est shoulders, and not to rest on the feeble and weak 

shoulders. 
10 



no Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



There are men who are like the oak which stands in 
the night to gather dew for itself, and then, if the wind 
in the morning shakes it, is willing to part with the few 
drops that it really can not hold on to ; and they call 

themselves benevolent ! 

Rich men are to bear the infirmities of the poor. 
Wise men are to bear the mistakes of the ignorant. 
Strong men are to bear with the feeble. Cultured peo- 
ple are to bear with rude and vulgar folks. 

If a rough and coarse man meets an ecstatically fine 
man, and the question between them is as to which shall 
give preference to the other, the man that is highest up 
is to be the sen-ant of the man that is lowest down. 

As a watch-maker never can see a watch that is out 
of order that he does not feel instinctively impelled to 
take hold of it and put it in order, so we ought never to 
see a man that is rude and unformed without wanting to 
put our hands on him to do him good. 

A man that has large benevolence and social feelings, 
and not large self-esteem and conscientiousness, is almost 
of necessity an Ar mini an. 

Before the millennial day dawns, whose night is auro- 
ral, and whose day is to be an unsetting day of glory, 
there must be this principle : that by the power which 
inheres in development and extraordinary excellence, 
there is to be nourishing beneath, not seeking to please 
ourselves, but to bear with the weak that need us. 

Some men think that the globe is a sponge that God 
puts into their hands to squeeze for their own garden or 
flower-pot. 



Benevolence, 



in 



He who selfishly hoards his joys, thinking thus to 
increase them, is like a man who looks at his granary 
and says, " Not only will I protect my grain from mice 
and birds, but neither the ground nor the mill shall 
have it." 

Refinement that carries us away from our fellow-men 
is not God's refinement. 

A person's face, like God's sun, ought to shine kindly 
upon the just and the unjust. 

Refinement should make a man finer in sensibility, 
so that he can bear with people that are not fine ; so 
that he feels that there is a golden chord of attachment 
springing up between him and every man that is not 
fine. 

The sanguine temperament affords the genuine good- 
natured disposition. 

An irritable man, whom any one can excite, is like a 
horse kept at livery, ridden by every one, and spurred 
by each rider. 

A compliment is praise crystallized. Some men come 
upon you like a cloud passing over the sun. You do not 
know what ails you, but you feel cold and chilly while 
they are about, and need an extra handful of coal on the 
fire when they tarry long. 

If there be one thing for which a man should be more 
grateful than for another, it is the possession of good- 
nature. 

Heart-varnish will cover up innumerable evils or de- 
fects. 



H2 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

The natural heart-singer is a man whose nature is 
large and luminous, and who, by his very carriage and 
spontaneous actions, calms, cheers, and helps his fel- 
lows. 

Love it is — not conscience — that is God's regent in 
the human soul, because it can govern the soul as noth- 
ing else can. 

Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps lead- 
ing us up to the great golden love of God. 

The universal introduction among men is the feeling 
that brings heart to heart, high and low, for it is that 
that makes all men kindred. 

Do not give, as many rich men do, like a hen that 
lays her egg and then cackles. 

A man should be lenient with everybody but himself. 

Some men crack their tongues as a driver does his 
whip ; and they come at last to think that the tongue 
was meant to be a whip. 

Your greatest pleasure is that which rebounds from 
hearts that you have made glad. 

Our kinder feelings must have expression, must rain, 
or else they will never bring up fruit and flower. 

We are nearest those, and most glorious in the es- 
teem of those, for whom we suffer most. 

Any man who has helped to beautify a city, any 
man who has helped to make the warehouses noble, the 
wharves and piers serviceable, has lived to a good pur- 
pose. 



Benevolence, 



ii3 



The marrow of the moral nature of man is the ne- 
cessity of habitual, constitutional, continuous, character- 
istic benevolence. 

Do something that shall go on benefiting man after 
you are dead, if it is only to plant a tree or a bush. 

You will die in a score of years, perhaps ; but not a 
score of centuries need slay the institution which you 
may rear. 

Gain wealth, and then endow institutions. This is 
the way to use wealth to a good purpose. 

Oh that we could remember and write the names of 
the men that planted the old elms in Hadley and Hat- 
field and Springfield, in Massachusetts, where so much 
beauty was so cheaply purchased for generations and 
generations ! 

The man with but a single virtue or charity is like a 
hen with one chicken. That solitary chicken calls 
forth more clucking and scratching than a whole brood 
causes. 

Good-nature is one of the richest fruits of true Chris- 
tianity. 

Men are called upon as a duty to cultivate and em- 
ploy generously and continuously those elements which 
make pleasure, and which make our fellow-men hap- 
pier. 

Blessed are the happiness-makers \ Blessed are they 
that take away attritions, that remove friction, that 
make the courses of life smooth, and the intercourse of 
men gentle ! 



H4 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

Those that have pity, kindness, love, taste, music, 
imagination, should throw these joy-bearing elements 
abundantly out of themselves, and make those around 
sweeter, truer, and happier. 

There is still a remnant of stoicism and asceticism 
among good men, leading to an unexpressed contempt 
for happiness-making. 

It is the sum of the million little unconscious dispo- 
sitions that go to make life joyful or painful. 

There is no business in this world so poor as pro- 
ducing pain ; there is no business in this world diviner 
than producing the higher forms of happiness and pleas- 
ure. 

Beautiful natures are those which send out to all 
who approach their coasts the fragrance of the land. 

The camellia is cold and odorless. A single opening 
bloom of a tea-rose fills a whole room with fragrance. 
No man's heart should be a camellia-heart ; men's hearts 
should be rose-hearts. 

Blessed are they whom you can not approach with- 
out perceiving that they exhale gladness and cheer and 
happiness ! 

When a man has gone into the service of the Lord 
ostensibly and externally, and is less sweet, less genial, 
less happiness-producing than he was before, he has 
made the mistake of setting aside benevolence. 

No man can afford to dispense with personal service 
toward the unfortunate. 



Benevolence. 



"5 



Those who give indiscriminately are the godfathers 
of swindlers. They encourage and breed a race of beg- 
gars, who feed unworthily upon the bread which belongs 
to the modest poor. 

The machinery of life needs a great deal of oiling 
that we may minister to the wants of others. 

A man might frame and set loose a star to roll in its 
orbit, and yet not have done so memorable a thing be- 
fore God as he who lets go a golden-orbed speech to 
roll through the generations of time. 

Though the world needs reproof and correction, it 
needs kindness more ; though it needs the grasp of the 
strong hand, it needs, too, the open palm of love and 
tenderness. 

A man who gives away all his seed-corn in the spring 
will beg in the autumn. The condition of power in be- 
nevolence is that it shall come by a man's taking care 
of himself. 

The maintenance of powerful benevolence is more 
vital to the Christian Church than dogmatic systems. 

It is a shame for a village to be treeless, and to be 
without ample accommodations both for foot-passen- 
gers and for beasts. It is a shame for a village to let 
stinginess prevent the securing of ample supplies of 
water for all. 

It is a shame for a man to have a good farm and a 
bad road in front of it. Every man should cheerfully 
and gratefully, not grudgingly, work for the community 
in which he lives. 



n6 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



No man has a right to do a good thing in a stingy 
and ugly way. 

Benevolence, love which administers for the good of 
man, that is God over all from center to circumference, 
and from circumference back to center again. 

Disinterestedness is the divine notion of perfection ; 
disinterested benevolence is the supreme ideal. 

Two thirds of people's generosity spills over. A 
man's cup is full, and others get the drippings. 

There are persons so radiant, so genial, so kind, so 
pleasure-bearing, that you instinctively feel in their pres- 
ence that they do you good ; whose coming into a room 
is like the bringing of a lamp there. 

Selfishness at the expense of others' happiness is 
demonism. 

Where men attempt to live far above their fellow- 
men, everything is pulling them down — and it ought to. 
No man has a right to build himself up selfishly for him- 
self. 

There is no music and no pleasure greater than that 
afforded by a sweet disposition uttered sweetly through 
the tongue. 

There is no person in this world that so uniformly 
takes his pay as he goes along, as he who does good at 
the expense of his own comfort and convenience. 

We should be in sympathy with universal mankind. 
We should speak with such consideration that our words 
shall be to men as the dripping of flowers. 



Religion. 



117 



No man has a right to own a beautiful picture and 
keep it for his own looking at. 

There are persons going about whose souls are as a 
whole band of music to everybody that is near them, and 
one dwells in their presence in a bounty of gladness 
perpetually. If they go, it is twilight ; if they come, it is 
sunlight. 



RELIGION. 

Many men want wealth — not a competence alone, 
but a five-story competence ; and religion they would 
like as a lightning-rod to their houses. 

Any one who has a bell in him that, ringing, will ring 
with " Holiness to the Lord," is a preacher. 

To be praised, and to have the reputation of liberality, 
is the way many people have of taking interest on what 
they lend to the Lord. 

There is an ugly kind of forgiveness in this world — 
a kind of hedgehog forgiveness, shot out like quills. 

Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and 
stuffed. 

The kind of conscience which makes a man indiffer- 
ent to his own disposition, and sets him to hounding 
everybody else, is not the kind of conscience which rep- 
resents the religion of Christ. 



n8 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

The gospel faithfully preached meddles with every- 
thing else on earth. 

A man's religion is himself. If he is right-minded 
toward God, he is religious ; if the Lord Jesus Christ is 
his schoolmaster, then he is Christianly religious. 

Men by multitudes are able to think deeply enough 
to unfix themselves in religion, who are not able to 
think deeply enough to fix themselves again. 

Grace does not fall on men like dew on a flower. 
The divine grace does not come as the light comes, un- 
asked, unmarshaled, and unobserved. We rise to sympa- 
thy with God only by the continuous stress of the will. 

The best minister is he who catches the most sinners, 
and does not let them go again. 

That is the best baptism that leaves the man cleanest 
inside. 

Some plants of the bitterest root have the whitest 
and sweetest blossoms ; so the bitterest wrong has the 
sweetest repentance. 

There is no heresy like that of negativeness of inac- 
tion, of death. The dead man is the great heresiarch. 

The differences between men lie in their power and 
scope of rising above the senses into the region of the 
invisible. The materialist collects his facts, and then 
sublimes them into a principle, and that is invisible. 

Religion is the whole soul marching heavenward to 
the music of joy and love, with well-ranked faculties, 
every one of them beating time and keeping tune. 



Religion, 



119 



Piety is the right performance of a common duty, as 
well as the experience of a special moral emotion. 

A man whose religion is dominated by an overhang- 
ing gloom of fear misrepresents religion as much as a 
cloudy day would misrepresent a sunshiny day, or as 
much as January would misrepresent June. 

Wherever a man's religion disfigures his disposition 
and makes it ugly, it is not a religion of the right sort. 
Asceticism is not true religion. 

The characteristics of a religious life are bountiful- 
< ness and liberty. Joy, peace, and righteousness are the 
definitions which the New Testament gives to Christian 
experience. Righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy 
Ghost — these are the fruits of religion. 

Hard, sharp-eyed, suspecting men — who always see 
everybody's faults but their own — do not represent re- 
ligion. Eagles are not doves, bitter is not sweet, essen- 
tial hatefulness is not lovely. 

The Holy Ghost descends with all the beautiful char- 
acteristics of sweetness, and peace, and joyfulness, and 
purity, and truth, and glory into the souls of men ; and 
they who present all the untoward features of unbeauty 
to man are the hinderers of religion. 

Some men want to have religion like a dark lantern, 
and carry it in their pocket, where nobody but them- 
selves can get any good from it. 

The old dispensation was a system of practices ; the 
new is a system of principles. A system of practices is 
never flexible, but principles are infinitely flexible. 



120 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

Every religious system that multiplies ordinances, 
that runs after rites and ceremonies, runs back to Ju- 
daism — that is, runs back to childhood. 

Conduct belonged to the old dispensation, and 
through that character was to be wrought out. In the 
new dispensation, it is character that is to be wrought 
out, and conduct is to flow from that. 

Whatever prophet stands at the mouth of the grave 
to shake the mildewing finger of doubt at man's belief in 
existence beyond this world, is an unlimited curse which 
is felt by none so much as by those that carry in them- 
selves the consciousness of manliness, and of nobility 
in it. 

He that lives by the sight of the eye may grow blind, 
and he that lives by the hearing of the ear may grow 
deaf, but he that lives by soul-power lives by that which 
will multiply endlessly in him treasures which no hand 
can touch. 

Orthodoxy that is simply the philosophy of truth is 
nothing but bones ; and if you take off the skin and 
flesh, and leave nothing but bones, the fairest form is 
not beautiful to look upon. 

Religion is not a pruning-knife, nor an axe, nor a 
saw, but what you get from their use — the pear, the 
apple, the grape. Religion is the fruit of the spirit, a 
Christian character, a true life. 

It is the duty of Christians to make religion lovely ; 
he who makes religion unlovely is more an infidel than 
if he simply denied the doctrines of Christianity. He is 
a worm at the core, and not a worm on the leaf. 



Religion. 



121 



A moral man is like an empty bottle, well corked, so 
that no defilement can get into it, so that it may be kept 
pure within. Pure ? And what is the use of a bottle 
that is pure, if it is empty and corked up ? 

Moral men are stakes, put up for use. There are no 
branches, and there is no shade to them. Stakes are 
very good, but they are better made of dead wood than 
of living. 

Every man's problem in life is, to take the disposi- 
tion which God gave him, and subdue every thought 
and feeling to the spirit of God. 

Religion to some is a beautiful suit of broadcloth, 
and a magnificent suit of silk, locked arm in arm, walk- 
ing to Grace Church, and sitting and listening to re- 
splendent music, surrounded by respectable people, that 
send cards through their coachmen's hands to one 
another. 

Any mind that is so constituted that it is in sympathy 
with intense ideas of governor and government is Cal- 
vinistic. 

Every man should make such a heaven over his head 
by his imagination, and should swing around such colors 
over the earth by the powers of his soul, that wherever 
he goes he shall carry with him all that he wants for any 
situation. 

What are called "fanatics" and "extremists" are 
only the men that God sends to make up the general 
average which the unfaithfulness of others lowers. 

Of all joyful, smiling, ever-laughing experiences, there 
are none like those which spring from true religion. 
ii 



122 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

The elect are whosoever will, and the non-elect who- 
soever won't. 

Morality must always precede and accompany re- 
ligion, and yet religion is much more than morality. 
God does not want only the roots and branches and 
leaves of morality. He wants the blossoming of the 
heart, and that is religion. 

I have an undying certainty in my bosom that I am 
allied to God in such a way that I shall not be ex- 
tinguished when this life is ended. 

The gauge of religion is the intensity and the pro- 
ductiveness of the love-principle. 

He is the prince, not who wears the crown outside, 
but who wears the crown inside. 

Ascetics are the products of ages of utter and aban- 
doned license. 

He is divinely favored who may trace a silver vein 
in all the affairs of life, see sparkles of light in the 
gloomiest scenes, and absolute radiance in those which 
are bright. 

In every man's bosom there is that which at times 
longs for something better and purer than he is. 

That state of mind in which a man is impressed with 
invisible things is faith. It is the use of the mind and 
the souUpower in distinction from the body-power. 

God's promises were never meant to ferry our lazi- 
ness. There is not an experience in life by whose side 
God has not fixed a promise. 



Religion, 



123 



Tears are often the telescope by which men see far 
into heaven. 

The natural administrative powers of Moses covered 
a breadth perhaps never equaled, certainly never sur- 
passed. 

Infidelity will never be scourged out of the world by 
the understanding. It will be melted out by the warm 
shining of the human heart. 

Some men think the object of conversion is to clean 
them, as a garment is cleaned ; and that when they are 
converted they are to be hung up in the Lord's wardrobe, 
the door of which is to be shut, so that no dust can get 
at them. 

God will certainly take care of his children if they 
bear their whole weight on him. It may not be just in 
their way, but he will do it. 

A man has no more religion than he acts out in his 
life. 

We carry through the grave the soul's virtues, its 
moral magnanimities, its divinities. 

Religion does lay on some men some degree of suffer- 
ing, but it is the suffering of emancipation. 

Giving the strength and beauty of life to the devil, 
and then offering the dregs of life to the Lord, is dirt- 
mean. 

Periodical excitements are normal to the human con- 
stitution. Revivals of religion are in strict accordance 
with natural law. 



124 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

Science can not supply faith in a loving God, and a 
God whom we can love. 

Meanness is the peculiar wickedness of weakness. 
It is the slave's way, the coward's way, the sneak's way, 
of being wicked. It indicates not a prolific nature, but 
a mousing nature. 

The impulses which men have from their passions 
ought always to be reviewed by their sober second 
thought ; but their inspirations from their higher feelings 
ought not to be made subjects of reflection. It is never 
safe to take them home and think them over. 

Four hundred thousand angels blowing trumpets for 
a fool would not give him a right to preach. 

As a cloud of silvery mist drops down over a ship 
and shuts it in, so that it can not go any farther, but casts 
anchor and waits, so conscience, when it begins to be 
troublous, is shut down in the midst of a silvery mist of 
mere well-wishing. 

The more conscientious men are when wrong, the 
more deadly are they in their persecutions, and the more 
disastrous is their influence on society. 

A man that is superstitious is like a tree that is cov- 
ered with mistletoe, not with leaves of its own. A man 
who lives in doubt is like a tree that is without any mis- 
tletoe, and is dead from top to root. Mistletoe is better 
than dead wood. 

Earn joy and then you shall be joyful. A man may 
put yeast into a measure of meal, but God never puts 
religion into a man. 



Religion. 



125 



There is above every man's head a height into which 
he may rise, and whether care and trouble fret below, or 
tear on, they become alike silent and powerless. 

Religion means work in a dirty world. The world is 
to be cleaned by somebody ; and you are not called of 
God if you are ashamed to scour and scrub. 

There are different qualities of revivals of religion. 
Some are far better than others ; but there is nothing so 
bad in spiritual things as moral death. 

Man's life, taken comprehensively, bears witness to 
nothing if not to the moral government of God, which 
rewards right conduct and punishes the reverse. 

If work be mean or disagreeable, let your religion 
weave Over it a network of flowers ; beautify it with piety, 
but never desert it. 

The object of religion is not to make dreamy specu- 
lators, but real, earnest, vigorous men. It is not to re- 
move the burden from our path, but to enable us to 
bear it. 

The great skepticisms of our time are market skep- 
ticism, political skepticism, and religious skepticism. 

Religion means that we are to let every faculty effulge, 
touched with celestial fire. 

Religion would frame a just man ; Christ would make 
a whole man. Religion would save a man ; Christ would 
make him worth saving. 

Truth, honesty, fidelity, are the three fundamental 
moralities on which religion must stand. 



126 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

True worship is not somber, but has lightness, gayety, 
and cheer. 

Devotion is not piety, but only the instrument of it. 
There is a hundred times more devotion than piety in 
the world. 

To do what you do not want to do, and not to do 
what you do want to do, is true self-denial. The im- 
pulse of every man is to do the agreeable thing. 

All true religion must stand on true morality. There 
never was an arch without something for its sides to rest 
on. 

The meanest thing in the world is — the devil. 

As a butler gets a cork out of a bottle, so men for- 
give oftentimes. 

It is hard to be a saint standing in a golden niche. 

God's providence is on the side of clear heads. 

Trees that grow fastest, stand stillest. There ought 
to be a fixed root-place for religious convictions. 

Religion is only another word for the right use of a 
man's whole self, instead of a wrong use of himself. 

Our divinest sentiments of religion — our affections, 
and loves, and tastes — God, the blessed Pilot, will carry 
safely through the grave and its darkness, and we shall 
be planted again in heaven. 

We should be thankful to men who have sung, their 
experiences in hymns ! Those hymns are our bells. 
We have strings and strings of bells wherever we go, be- 
cause we have hymns singing to us all manner of things. 



Religion. 127 

Piety is a process by which the spiritual in men gains 
a complete ascendency over the physical. 

Every wrong which a man commits against his own 
soul will find him out, and administer its own penalty. 

Every time you trifle with reverent or sacred things, 
it is as though you scratched a mirror ; and afterward 
every image that you see when you look at these things 
is marred. 

There was never, probably, so intelligent a religious 
faith in so many men as there is to-day. 

Reformation is not religion, though it often precedes 
and always accompanies it. There is no curing effects 
until causes are reached. 

A frozen ship is a figure of a man's soul before grace 
enters it. 

Religion is intended to fit a man for life— to teach 
him how to carry himself in his business, his pleasures, 
and his pains, as much as to aid him when he dies. 

Hours are like sponges — they wipe out good resolu- 
tions. 

You can never go in at the " strait gate " with mean- 
nesses, dishonesties, unkindnesses, clinging to your will. 

Religionists seem ordained to war ; and so two doc- 
trines meet each other as two dogs, strangers in the 
neighborhood, with risings in the back, with growlings 
in the mouth, and with eyes full of anything but amiable- 
ness. 

Men ought to suspect the raptures of religion when 
they are selfish in the details of their life. 



T28 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

There is a real difference between religion and relig- 
iousness, or religiosity. Nothing is more dangerous than 
intensity of feeling, and paucity of conduct as the result 
of that feeling. 

Men are never struck, as with lightning, and instantly 
changed in character, being debased sinners one minute, 
and the next rapturous saints. 

Religion is only another word for character, and it 
is developed in men. Religious education is a growth, 
and requires time. 

Enthusiasts always get disciples ; even if they be scat- 
ter-brained, they win their way. 

Religion is the heart and not the understanding. 
Though it employs the reason^ it bears to it the same 
relation that a pair of spectacles bear to the eyes. It is 
merely a help to the eyes. 

There is no creed like the hymn-book. 

Satan loves asceticism. It is the devil's spawn. Joy 
is a divine element. It is one of the qualities of man- 
hood. 

There is a religious life which has bones in it, and 
muscles on the bones, and flesh clothing the muscles. 
A religious life has for its soul to desire and prefer and 
choose the highest and best things, 

The Athanasian Creed is abominable necromancy 
run mad — a miserable, daft, insane thing. 

In religious matters it is in the ratio of right-know- 
ing that a man is likely to be a right-minded man. 



Religion, 



129 



There is no man that has learned patience who does 
not carry it through the grave. There is no man who 
has learned the art of subduing pride who does not carry- 
that through the grave. 

Are we made to tick and keep the hours of this mor- 
tal sphere only ? When we are done here, shall we be 
run down forever, never to move again ? • Or do we be- 
long to the horology of the universe ? 

He who teaches the young that they must scorn the 
idea of precise beliefs, and that the better way is, to 
come up generally in religious truth, is a traitor to the 
young. 

Religion is a state of the soul. The kingdom of God 
is within us. 

Babes that God takes to heaven are not kept babes ; 
they must grow. Babes that God takes are more than 
mighty princes on earth. 

Heaven is not a place where you shall stand like 
forty wax-candles in two rows. 

We shall go to heaven not to shrink with age, to find 
poverty and distortion, but to find riches, and symmetry, 
and to develop into all the glory of everlasting youth. 

It is the unknown life to come that cheers and 
blesses the known life that now is. 

Every one of us will know one another in heaven. 
The sensibilities of this poor dim earth are no interpre- 
tation of the sensibilities of heaven. 

Religious institutions can never do the work of the 
economic and social institutions of society. 



130 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



Indifference in religion is more fatal than skepticism. 
There is no pulse in indifference ; skepticism may have 
warm blood. 

How much we are opposed to the Pope at Rome ! 
V/ ould that we were half as much opposed to the Pope 
at home ! 

No grace can save any man unless he helps himself. 

There is no religion except in the vital powers of 
men in a state of activity. 

Honor should ripen into religion, if that does not 
already exist ; and, when religion comes into the soul, it 
should develop honor. 

Self-denial, faith, hope, patience, kindness, are germs, 
waiting for influences in the life to come to bring them 
forth. 

Reason is a permanent blessing of God to the soul. 
Without it, there can be no large religion. 

Religion is a restraint on man's passions and appe- 
tites, and so promotes his prosperity. 

The church is no more religion than the masonry of 
the aqueduct is the water that flows in it. 

In the world's history there was never an age in 
which there was so deep and serious a religious faith as 
now. 

In the communities where you find the most religion 
you will find the most worldly prosperity. 

Where the truest form of regulated religion prevails, 
there you find the largest amount of thrift. 



Religion. 



One of the subtile and intricate evidences of religion 
is the fact that high feeling in the moral sentiments, so 
far from being exhausting, is nourishing. 

Where there is a weary heart, the Christian hymn 
will sing ; where there is a sorrow, the hymn will chant 
on ; where there is an aspiring soul, it will be winged 
upward by the hymn. 

There is a great deal of religion that is not gentle- 
manly. It is neither refined, nor generous, nor mag- 
nanimous. There is a great deal of religion that is dra- 
gooned religion. 

Religion is as much the child of intelligence as in- 
telligence is the child of religion. 

Any preaching which takes away from the Christian 
quiet and restfulness, is not a true representation of the 
gospel. 

We must not confound religion with theology, any 
more than we must confound the music of an organ with 
the notes from which it is played. 

Some men are born, as it were, close by the king- 
dom of God. 

Good men's prayers are carried by the angelic mail; 
but many men's prayers evidently go by the demo- 
niac route. They are never so bad as after they have 
prayed. 



132 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



THEOLOGY. 

The doctrines which the schools teach are no more 
like those of the Bible than the carved beams of Solo- 
mon's temple were like God's cedar-trees on Mount 
Lebanon. 

The old rugged doctrines of the schools may be too 
sharp here or there ; but, after all, those old rugged 
doctrines have in them power both for condemnation 
and for lifting up and for consolation. 

All truths whose root and life are in the Infinite are 
like the fixed stars, which become no larger under the 
most powerful telescope than to the natural eye. 

God's providence is his capacity to use natural laws 
and make them serve men. 

It is far more likely that there will be another 
Homer than that there will be another Augustine; that 
there will be another Shakespeare than that there will 
be another Calvin. 

Your theology is the trellis, over which obedience, 
sympathy, gratitude, love, the various moral elements, 
clamber. 

There are but two conditions to God's mercy — want 
and willingness; and these sweet truths of God have 
been webbed over by theologians as the flowers of the 
prairie are by black and ugly spiders. 

God's sovereignty is not in his right hand; God's 
sovereignty is not in his intellect ; God's sovereignty is 
in his love. 



Theology. 



133 



Man does not need to be taught that God will pun- 
ish. All Nature has been teaching us that. Groans, 
tears, suffering, sickness, sorrow, death, tell us that there 
is penalty for violated law. 

The gospel, while it concerns individual salvation, 
and the salvation of each individual generation, has 
a larger purpose — the augmentation of future world- 
character. 

Men make their wicker-work systems of theology the 
basis of a familiarity with divine thought, and divine 
action, and divine being, which is truly astonishing. 

Providence is but another name for natural law. 
Natural law itself would go out in a minute if it were 
not for the divine thought that is behind it. 

The most consummate ideal that men have ever 
known, or felt, or thought, is the ideal of one who is 
supreme and sovereign, guiding Nature and in it Provi- 
dence. 

Everything that happens in this world is part of a 
great plan of God running through all time. 

The habit of God's mind seems to be to take a germ, 
one root-idea, and to prove what infinite variations it is 
susceptible of. 

Daily events are only elements of greater events that 
require long periods for their consummation. 

Atonement is not like a chest of medicine, and Christ 
did not come like an apothecary and make medicine as 
long as his materials lasted, and his medicine was not 
sufiicent merely for a portion of the sick. 



134 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



THE BIBLE. 

What a pin is when the diamond has dropped from 
its setting, that is the Bible when its emotive truths have 
been taken away. 

What a babe's clothes are when the babe has slipped 
out of them into death, would be the Bible, if the Babe 
of Bethlehem should slip out of it. 

It is a marvel in literature that the most profound 
conceptions of the sin and guilt of mankind are the 
subject-matters of a sacred literature more cheerful and 
hopeful, more invigorating and comforting, than any that 
has ever existed. 

There is not in the world a book which is pervaded 
with such a spirit of exhilaration as the New Testament. 
Nowhere does it pour forth a melancholy strain. 

The Scriptures never jest, they never ridicule, they 
never deal in any wise in comic scenes, and yet, by a 
method of their own, produce sympathy, elevation of 
mind, high hope, and cheerful resignation. 

The Bible is a cheerful book. Those that wrote it 
were, for the most part, cheerful men. 

You may read the New Testament through, and you 
will not find a morbid word from Matthew to Revela- 
tion. 

With a Bible full of cheer, it is shame to the de- 
sponding man ! Shame to the unsmiling Christian ! 
Shame to the gyved, manacled man who stands forth as 
a son of God ! 



The Bible. 



135 



Many persons of combative tendencies read the Bible 
for ammunition, and dig out of it iron for balls. They 
read, and they find niter and charcoal and sulphur for 
powder. They read, and they find cannon. So men 
turn the Word of God into a vast arsenal. 

The Bible stands alone in human literature in its 
elevated conception of manhood, in character and con- 
duct. 

There is not a noble faculty that is not struck in the 
Bible, and that does not chime in that belfry of sweet 
affections and sublime thoughts. 

The Word of God tends to make large-minded, noble- 
minded men. 

God's Word is a vast forest ; and as a man can build 
out of the timber that is growing in the forest, a hut, or 
a common mansion, or a palatial residence, so out of the 
Word of God man can build a poor theology, or a rich 
theology, or a glorious theology, according to his selec- 
tions. 

With all the advantage of the light which has been 
shed upon men, we come back to Paul's epistles yet, as 
to a forest, to cut our timber when we want love. 

Children of oppression will always be children of the 
Old Testament. 

All that part of the Bible is Bible to you which you 
live by ; but so much of it as you do not vitalize is of 
no use to you. 

The Bible is full of roads by which people seek to 
get around difficult things. 



136 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 



The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through 
his telescope, then he sees worlds beyond; but, if he looks 
at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that. 

In the Bible every form of speech is exhausted to 
signify the all-presence of God; and nowhere else is 
this so fully set forth. Only the Bible attempts to tell 
what God does — not what he is ; what he thinks, what 
he feels, what he means ; what we may do with him, and 
what we may have from him. 

Find what fault you please with the straw of the 
Bible, but when you come to take the wheat out of its 
husks the wheat is perfect. 

There is not a single contradiction in the Bible from 
Genesis to Revelation. It is the medicine-book of the 
ages, and the repository of remedies. 

A man who has in his pocket the Proverbs of Solo- 
mon has more brains in his pocket than the world 
generally have in their heads. 

There are reverists who are so familiar with the 
Bible that it is worn smooth. Their wheels slip, as it 
were, on the track, their thoughts run off into reverie. 

The Bible may be so interpreted by a besotted priest- 
hood that plain men may be driven from the book for 
their very faith in its essential contents. 

Men make no distinction between the Bible and the 
system which has been wrought out of the Bible, though 
there is just as much difference as there is between the 
iron-ore from the mines of Pennsylvania and the imple- 
ments that are forged out of that ore. 



The Bible. 



137 



The Bible professes to be a book of remedies, a book 
of moral training, moral restriction, moral remedy. 

The Bible is a singing book, a healthy book, a book 
which has not a morbid spot in it from beginning to end, 
a book which is full of choirs, full of angel voices, full of 
inspiration, full of nobleness and grandeur, all the way 
through. 

No architect ever conceived of such an estate as 
God's Word, and no artist, or carver, or sculptor ever 
conceived of such pictures and carved dishes and statues 
as adorn its apartments. 

The seventh chapter of Romans is the Miserere of 
the New Testament. 

The Old Testament is full of cheerfulness — of buoy- 
ancy — and commands to it. ' 

The gospel is God's angel to defend the right and 
smite the wrong. It is God's fire-brand to burn out of 
corrupt men the dross, to leave the pure gold. 

In all the writings of the New Testament, fervor, in- 
tensity, is required in every feeling. Men never phos- 
phoresce until they come to intensity of feeling ; they 
never glow unless they have had intense experiences. 

Over the bright bridge of Christ's words we now 
walk, sure that we shall not plunge into a gulf of dark- 
ness and forgetfulness at death, but that we shall live 
again, and live forever. 

The Bible forms a water-shed on each side, as it all 
runs into the eighth chapter of Romans for depth, and 
width, and momentum. 



138 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

The New Testament underlays human life with mo- 
tives which dignify it in all its parts. 

The Apocalypse, so to speak, is Ood's northern 
lights. All the auroral glory of heaven seems to flash 
out in these various symbolisms. 

All the figures which have power on the human im- 
agination have been employed in the New Testament to 
describe heaven. 

When a man has given up the one fact of the in- 
spiration of the Scriptures, he has given up the whole 
foundation of revealed religion. 

There is not one thing more characteristic of Christ's 
teaching than that constant largeness of sphere in his 
thought — that looking to the great Beyond. 

The doctrines of the Bible are like flowers that are 
in the morning all covered with spiders' webs. They 
are obscured and mystified by theological spiders. 

The Bible is the center jewel of which creation is 
the setting. 

The texts in the Bible we least need are the ones we 
like best and remember longest. 

The Apostle Paul's letters are full of allusions to 
practical life — to store life, to business life, to magis- 
terial life, to the life of the king and of the subject, to 
the life of the citizen under all circumstances. 

There is a great deal more meaning in many of the 
passages of the Bible than we can give to them. Many 
of the texts of Scripture kill sermons dead. A wise 
preacher skips the best texts. He can not work them up. 



The Bible. 



139 



There is not a vulgarizing maxim in the New Testa- 
ment. 

The Bible does not create truth, but merely ex- 
pounds it, brings it into practical shapes, and makes it 
usable to men. 

Nowhere else is there such an atmosphere of the in- 
finite spirit-realm that lies just outside the border of this 
world as in the teaching of the Saviour. 

It is the medicating power of the Bible that gives it 
its value. It is its secret power on conscience, and 
faith, and hope. 

The Old Testament is a book of intense enthusiasm. 

The friendliness, the exaltation, the nobility, the gen- 
tleness, the encouragement, the helpfulness, and the 
beautifulness of the New Testament, make it a most 
wonderful book. 

The Old Testament is a book of farming. It is a 
book of political economy. It is a book full of maxims 
of thrift. 

There is no such collection of wisdom for daily life 
in the family, in the street, in the shop, on the ship, in 
the store, as the Proverbs of Solomon. 

The Bible has been constructed in such a way that 
it is an armory of mercy, a magazine of kindness, a 
great institution of mercifulness ! 

The Bible is a book of this world, about this world, 
about the things which men think of in this world, and 
about the temptations which beset us in this world from 
day to day. 



140 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

The Bible is the book of the common people. It is 
the workingman's book, the child's book, the slave's 
book. It is the book of every creature that is down- 
trodden. 

Politeness might be substituted in the thirteenth 
chapter of first Corinthians for charity. 

Nowhere can be found a substitute for that sublime 
conception of God that pervades the Old Testament. 

Repetition in endless varieties is the method of in- 
struction in the Bible. 

Few men can put on a Psalm of David. The gar- 
ment is many times too large. 

The Bible is the invaluable training-book of the 
world. 

As there are always among violets some that are very 
much sweeter to us than others, so among texts there 
are some that are more precious to us than others. 

There is nothing like a servile acceptance of imposed 
conclusions recommended in the Word of God. 

The Word of God is a grand encourager of the su- 
preme use of the understanding of men, both in things 
secular and in things spiritual and divine. 



Nature of God. 



141 



NATURE OF GOD. 

The superfluous blossoms on a fruit-tree are meant 
to symbolize the large way in which God loves to do 
pleasant things. 

God pardons like a mother who kisses the offense 
into everlasting forgetfulness. 

God Almighty is the mother, and the soul is the 
tired child ; and he folds it in his arms, and dispels its 
fears, and lulls it to repose, saying, " Sleep, my darling, 
sleep." " He giveth his beloved sleep." 

God made the world to relieve an overfull creative 
thought ; as musicians sing, as we talk, as artists sketch 
when full of suggestions. 

When a man repents toward God, he repents toward 
all love and delicacy. God receives the soul as the sea 
the bather, to return it again, purer and whiter than he 
took it. 

God is not a bundle of thunder-storms. 

Motherhood is only a miniature form of the all-loving 
and all-nursing heart of God. 

God is revealed in the Bible as a Presence, right over 
against human necessity, and therefore relative to human 
necessity. 

The God revealed by the Lord Jesus Christ has a 
mother-heart, and takes care of unworthiness, of unripe- 
ness, of undeveloped excellence, and brings them up 
toward perfection. 



142 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

God's goodness and love carry sympathy and succor 
and medicine and help. 

The Divine Being brings comfort and consolation to 
men. He is a God for men that are weak, and want to 
be strong ; for men that are impure, and want to be pure ; 
for men that are unjust, and want to be just ; for men 
that are unloving, and want to be loving ; for men that 
aspire to all the greatness and glory of which the soul is 
capable. 

Universal Wisdom and Power sits central in the uni- 
verse, and holds all things in his hands, as the skillful 
driver holds the reins of the easily controlled team that 
he drives. 

God's works do not come from his hand like coins 
from the mint. It seems as if it were a necessity that 
each should be in some sort distinct from every other. 

God's least thought is more prolific than man's great- 
est abundance. 

The length and breadth, the height and depth of God 
are in the sphere of love. He is not merely a magisterial 
and juridical Deity; he is not merely a God perfect in 
holiness. 

God is present in a silent way always. A certain hid- 
den element or hiding element there is in the divine 
mind. God's blessings steal into life noiselessly. They 
are neither self-proclaiming nor even self-announcing. 

Mercies tell us what God is. They are his children. 
He is the Father of mercies. They are part of his nature. 
They are not what he does so much as what he is. 



Nature of God. 



143 



God is the most minute housekeeper in the universe. 
Nobody else knows so well as he what is needed for the 
meal and for the wardrobe. Nobody else knows so well 
as he what the till has in it. Nobody else knows so 
well as he about rent and fuel. Nobody else knows so 
well as he about the body. 

Where did the instinct of love which we see through- 
out the world come from ? Worms take care of worms ; 
birds take care of birds ; and, as we rise in the animal 
kingdom, the instinct becomes stronger and stronger. 
These are fingers pointing up and saying, " The great 
God that made us, and taught us to love, is himself the 
great Lover." 

There has been a divine purpose moving upon the 
world, and shaping the destiny of nations, and carrying 
things forward toward some bright, future, millennial day. 

A mother's love interprets God, and brings him be- 
fore man's mind as the embodiment of father, mother, 
and home. 

The old dispensation had a muffled God, a God in- 
visible ; but the New Testament is God made known 
through Jesus Christ — a living force ; not an idea, not 
an imagination, certainly not an abstraction, but a living 
force. 

God is the majestic and mighty Heart, rich, glowing, 
glorious, yearning, and desiring good, and scattering it, 
as through the spheres he scatters light and atmosphere. 

God is himself a vast medicine for man. It is the 
heart of God that carries restoration, inspiration, aspira- 
tion, and final victory. 



144 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

God is the God of all comfort — the great-breasted 
God, the great Mother-God into whose arms come those 
that weep, where he comforts them, even as a mother 
comforts her child. And the earth itself is rocked, as it 
were, by that same tending, nursing, loving God. 

By his nature God is essentially patient with imper- 
fection, essentially curative of animalism and depravity, 
essentially stimulating and spiritualizing. 

A Christian man conscious of imperfection finds 
peace and rest in the thought of God's loving and nurs- 
ing nature — of that nature which mothers men, and waits 
to be gracious. 

God overtures his grace, and it is rejected or neg- 
lected. He waits, and waits, and waits to be gracious. 

It is the infinite, overflowing, swelling impulse of the 
divine nature to cure souls of their diseases ; to augment 
that which is good in them ; to develop them ; to equip 
them ; to perfect them. 

As humanity needs divinity, divinity yearns for hu- 
manity, and there is a current in the universe like the 
Gulf Stream, which carries life even to the poles. 

We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the 
literature of eternity. 

God's nature is medicinal to ours. There are no 
troubles which befall our suffering hearts, for which there 
is not in God a remedy, if only we rise to receive it. 

Scientists are attempting to come to God head-first. 
They must come to him heart-first. Then let their heads 
interpret what they have found. 



Nature of God. 



145 



A God by definition is never a living God, and a 
child is incompetent to understand such a being. 

Is there any man that can take the reed of his under- 
standing and lay it along the line of God's latitude and 
longitude, as if he were measurable as a city? 

Men are the complements of one another ; and it is 
only the voice of mankind that is competent to pro- 
nounce the nature of God, and not the voice of a single 
man. 

They are the richest men in this world who are lay- 
ing up the brightest, the clearest, and the most helpful 
and noble conceptions of God. 

Infinite applies to the feelings of God as much as to 
his justice and power. There is nothing in his nature 
that is not measureless. 

Every thought of God is medicinal. Every impul- 
sion of God is curative. Every function of the divine 
mind brings health. 

No man can form a philosophical conception of God 
which is perfect, which he can round out and present to 
the world, and of which he can say, That is God — just 
that, and no more." 

God is, above all other things, Poet, Architect, the 
great Painter. Wiser is he than the wisest statesman, 
more eloquent than the finest speaker. 

The tenderness and tearfulness of God are the most 
surprising manifestations of his nature; for the words 
are to be taken literally — God was manifest in the flesh. 
13 



146 Proverbs from Plymouth PulpiL 

God gives as the wheat gives : we sow one grain, and 
reap a hundred. 

That God pities and pardons, it is precious to know. 
But that he loves with special affection, and can take 
delight in us — this is overwhelming. Yet both the Old 
and New Testaments teach this. 

God's love to man is more than motherhood, or 
fatherhood, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or friendship, 
or love of lover. 

The heart of God is the world's hospital. 

It is only love that can find out God without search- 
ing. 

What attribute of God, what other inflection of his 
character is so noble and sublime as this — his gentleness ? 

The longest telegraph ever made was that between 
the heart of God and suffering humanity. 

There is a great, overshadowing love of God to us, 
that stands not on account of our character, but on ac- 
count of his. 

The single view on which a man can lie down and 
die without fear is this : God loves me because it is his 
nature to love. 

The marvel of meekness, and sweetness, and love, is 
the Arch-Thunderer of Eternity— this it is that is past 
finding out. 

What the rounded drop of water is in comparison with 
the whole earth, that the earth is itself in comparison 
with God's majesty of being or degree of magnitude. 



Nature of God. 



H7 



There is no such lover as God. There is no such 
magnanimity as there is in God's nature. There is no 
such friend as God. There is no such harbor or refuge 
as his bosom. 

The divine qualities of men are but the slightest 
hints, the faintest intimations, of the attributes of God. 

That which men saw of God during his life on earth 
of thirty years was only a specimen of his life before 
and after. 

Men have lifted God into such a solitariness of su- 
premacy and sovereignty as to make him unsympathetic, 
careless of men, and regardful of nothing but himself. 

One text that hooks a man to God, a father, con- 
troller of time and eternity, creator and sustainer of all 
mankind, takes away care, and anxiety, and sorrow. 

God hates sin very much as mothers hate wild beasts. 

That in God which is distinct from that which is in 
man is unknown and unknowable. 

The gospel teaching is that God's love is the prime 
and grand attribute of his nature. 

We can love love, but we can not love mere justice. 
When love is also just, true, pure, beautiful, radiant 
with taste, it becomes all the more priceless. 

As the sunlight comes down and bathes the world, 
covering leagues and latitudes and infinite spaces, and 
in inexhaustible abundance, so is the love of God thrown 
down upon the world. 

God's glory is his goodness. 



148 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

The necessity of God that he should make himself 
known is the foundation of revealed religion. 

The secret force of the ages is the yearning of God 
for men. 

If God be vital, if he be ineffable, full of fiery feel- 
ing, and if that feeling is tempered round about the 
tropic of love, he is one we can give our hearts to. 

It is the nature of God to need love. It is a hunger 
which is stronger in the divine heart than it is in any 
human heart. 

If God numbers the hairs of our heads, what notice 
must he take of our living hearts ! 

God does not sit like a thunder-storm in the sky. 
Men do not need to approach him under an umbrella 
of excuses. 

God has gladness for those who are glad, and pity 
for those who are sad. 

God wears many robes. He comes in new apparel. 
Whatever change takes place, it is only God in another 
dress. 

The noblest heart on earth is but a trickling stream 
from a faint and wasting fountain compared with the 
ineffable heart and soul of God, the everlasting Father. 

When birds are on the nest, preparing to bring forth 
life, they never sing. God's stillness is full of brooding. 

Our best conceptions, our truest ideals, our highest 
moods — even these interpret God but imperfectly to us. 
We see through a glass darkly. 



Nature of God, 



149 



God looks upon man's littleness as compared with 
his angels that excel in strength, much, it may be sup- 
posed, as we look upon little children as compared with 
grown-up men. 

Nature and Providence teach that when love rules in 
heaven, and puts its soft arms around man, and lays its 
soft hands on man, there are bones in those arms and 
in those hands. That love means truth, justice, govern- 
ment. 

There has been many and many a man who has said 
his prayers to the devil, thinking that he sat on the 
throne of Jehovah. 

The representations of God which make him good- 
natured rather than good, that he will not permit suffer- 
ing, that he will not punish the wrong-doer, is not script- 
ural, experimental, rational, or philosophical. 

The happiest being in the universe is God, because he 
has an infinite desire of benevolence, and infinite means 
of gratifying it. 

God is a being of great thoughts, great feelings, great 
actions. Whenever he does anything, he never does it 
narrowly, certainly not meanly. 

Over every jail and hospital there is a tenderer spirit 
brooding than ever passes in or out through the door. 

There is nothing so marvelous in the divine nature 
as God's long-suffering. 

God does good not because men are good, but simply 
because he is good. He loves unlovely beings ; he for- 
gives hateful folks. 



150 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 



God's special providence is always on the side of the 
tempest. 

God is a being who sits in the center of the universe 
with a nature so full of all bounty that it has an endless 
flow like a river. 

There is no servant like God. No other being so 
humbles himself, and so bows down under weakness, and 
so lifts up with his strength, as God in the plenary service 
of Love. 

The ground of forgiveness in the Bible lies not in 
the recipient, but in the giver. We forgive because it is 
the nature of goodness to do it. 

God is the one great Employer, Thinker, Planner, 
Supervisor. 

There is nothing that man has learned to esteem ; 
there is nothing that seems glorious in beauty that has 
not been appropriated in the New Testament, in some 
form or other of parable, or symbol, or figure, to describe 
God's loving-kindness. 

It is the higher nature of man that furnishes the ideal 
conception of God. Without this higher form of an- 
thropomorphism there is no Christianity ; no practical 
and comforting view of God ; no companionable Father 
in heaven — there is nothing left for the heart. 

God, thought of only as he is interpreted through the 
alembic of scientific research upon the material globe, is 
but an engineer. The world is a mill — not a mansion. 

God is not a vast, billowy Being, soft as feathers are, 
white as down is, and powerless as they. 



Nature of God. 



There is not enough of man in the lower animals to 
enable them to understand men ; and there is not enough 
of God in men to enable them to understand God. 

The whole of God's being can not be understood, 
but enough of it can be understood to trust it. 

The thinking nature of man, his affectional nature, 
and his moral nature, are alphabetic elements from 
which he can spell out something of the divine nature. 

It makes a great deal of difference what sort of a God 
men believe in, as well as whether they believe in any 
God or not. 

God regards the trooping millions that come from all 
worlds and all periods of time seeking the heavenly gate, 
and crying out, " Father ! Father ! Father ! " as most 
beautiful and glorious. 

God's love is medicinal. His life is a world-nursing 
life. He cleanses whom he loves, that he may love yet 
more. 

Love and sympathy and pity are not less real in God 
than in man. 

God is on the side of sinners for the purposes of res- 
cue. God healing sin, instead of punishing it, is the 
model for Christian dispositions. 

The picture of a mother with a child in her lap, is 
the picture of God with humanity and the world in his 
lap. 

The most intensely thoughtful and the most inten- 
sively active being in the universe is God. He is never 
weary of his work. 



152 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



God is the great Cultivator. All the agencies of 
Nature are for God. For him the nations are simple 
instruments of culture. 

No God have we who sits like a marble statue on the 
throne of the universe. God is incessantly active ; there 
is no day or night to his life. 

God's whole nature moves toward the man who wants 
to be free from sin, as broadly and irresistibly as the 
summer moves from the south toward the north. 

God is love, and man must take heed lest he run the 
lines of red blood — cruelty — around the image and por- 
traiture of God. 



CHRIST. 

In the death of Christ there were avowed though un- 
explained relations to the invisible world and to moral 
influences. 

It is the practical adaptation of the divine nature 
to the wants of the suffering world that makes Christ so 
unquestionably divine. 

Calvary shall stand forever, and, glowing through all 
space, shine as a mighty jewel that God hath set as a 
memorial of his everlasting love. 

No man is so armed as the man who has this single 
element of faith — Jesus Christ, the Saviour of sinners, 
of whom I am chief. 



Christ. 



153 



There is such a thing as communion with Christ, as 
one speaketh to a friend face to face. 

Christ presents to the mind a better, wider, deeper, 
and more correct theory and conception of what God is, 
than can be derived from nature or philosophy, or any 
of the analogies of human life or human experience. 

There is no picture ever painted, no statue ever 
carved, half so beautiful as a living man thoroughly de- 
veloped upon the pattern of Christ Jesus. 

There were two kinds of affection in Christ — the 
general feeling which we style benevolence, and an indi- 
vidual and special attachment. God loves not only in 
the general way, but also with that individuality and 
specialty of which we are ourselves capable one toward 
another. 

Around the simple cross-wood the heart of the world 
has gathered for twenty centuries its stores of admiration, 
of love, of devotion. 

There is a strange law of vicarious suffering wrought 
into the very structure of human life. It is suffering 
that gives life, and then it is worn as a robe of life. 

Every element of a man's being can be so brought 
into connection with the Lord Jesus Christ that intel- 
lectually a man may be both developed and fed. 

The blood of Christ makes of one blood all good 
men on earth. We are blood-kindred to all that have 
been blood-sprinkled from on high. 

Christ's life was spontaneous ; it was performed as a 
joy ; he counted it a joy to suffer. 



154 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

Every act of Christ carries us right home to him as 
God, so that we can say, " This tells me how God feels, 
and what he is." 

The personal relation to Christ alone makes a man a 
Christian — the personal identification of the human heart 
with the Lord Jesus Christ. 

• We need the personal allegiance of love to Christ — 
such a presentation of him through the imagination to 
our minds as will draw forth the soul's enthusiasm and 
secret life. 

Every man must, by the inflammation of his own 
heart-feelings, find his Christ. 

Thousands of hearts feel the drawing of Christ's great 
heart ; just as the ocean does not know what ails it, but 
it swings to and fro, following the planets. 

Open the head of a man and deftly take out the whole 
brain, and every particle of his nervous system, without 
destroying any other function, and close up the head, 
and have life go on : what that body would be is Chris- 
tianity with Christ taken out. 

A man may love Christ in his heart as if he were 
God, although in terms he denies that he is God. He 
ascribes to him, not by thought but by affection, every- 
thing that constitutes allegiance to divinity. The heart 
worships him. 

Christ is the one great typical man; and all high 
manhood necessarily conforms to Christ. 

Take from the Bible the Godship of Christ, and it 
would be but a heap of dust. 



Christ. 



155 



Whenever Christ is born into the world, he comes 
in as when he was first born. He came in at the bot- 
tom. He came in through a manger, with the poor 
standing round about him. 

There is not in the New Testament one caution or 
guard against our overtrusting or over-exalting Christ. 

All the scenes of the past in the life of Christ have 
but one office: to instruct us how to imagine and lay 
hold of a Living and a Present Saviour. 

The moment one realizes the goodness of Christ, his 
helpfulness, his lenient, forgiving, sympathizing spirit, he 
knows what faith in Christ means. Such a man is not a 
religious man merely, but a Christian. 

The qualities suggested to us by the affections — as 
tenderness, gentleness, patience, sweetness, and the beau- 
ty and rapture of love — are found centered in Jesus. 

The marriage of the soul to Christ — that is the dis- 
closure of the gospel. 

Christ is presented to us in the comprehensible form 
of God. He is God translated. 

You can find your hero always in Christ. He was 
not a quietist ; he was not a pietist alone. Christ loved 
flowers, and talked about them ; watched birds, and 
knew about them. He was a Lamb, but he was no less 
the Lion of the tribe of Judah. 

Christ sometimes says, " I am a road, walk on me " ; 
at other times he comes as the brown loaf, and says, 
" Eat me " ; at other times he trickles musically past us, 
and says, " I am the River of Life, drink of me." 



156 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 



In Christ was comprehended the fullest conception 
of greatness and nobleness of character. Every idea of 
true manhood is in him. 

There was just as much of force and terrible wrath 
in Christ as there was of gentleness and meekness. 

The experience of Paul and the earliest Christians 
revolved around the center of their love and fidelity to 
Christ. Piety with them was loyalty. 

Not oceans or lands, not temples or palaces, not 
battles or dynasties or races, are for one single moment 
to be compared to a single soul that has been built up 
by Jesus Christ. 

Christ reformed men by inspiring the love of good- 
ness, as well as by hatred of evil. He controlled the 
passions by the inspiration of the moral sentiments. 

What in summer the sun is, compared with all its 
earthly products — flowers, and leaves, and grass — that is 
Christ to the Christian compared to all the products of 
Christ in his mind and in his soul. 

There never was so happy a man as Jesus Christ. 

Christ lives to bring sons and daughters home to 
glory, and whoever keeps step with him is his com- 
panion. 

Christ's life was filled up with a thousand small 
shades of goodness, whose very nature it was to make 
men contented and happy. 

No person has drunk in the spirit of the Lord Jesus 
Christ who does not make other persons happier when 
he comes to them. 



Christ. 



157 



The glorified Christ is in sympathy with things that 
are lowly and needy, things that are helpless and things 
that are piteous. 

Where human life needs most sympathy, where usu- 
ally it is the most barren, there it is that Christ is more 
likely to be found than anywhere else. 

Would you paint Christ ? Bring the sweetest virtues, 
the gentlest manners, the clearest wisdom, the most long- 
suffering patience, the noblest pleasures, all that makes 
heaven a garden of delight, and from these rare qualities, 
sublimed by the imagination, with trembling hand, touch 
here and there a feature. 

No individual in his lifetime ever experienced so 
much joy as was compressed into the life of Jesus Christ. 

Christ was a man among men ; and if he looked up 
his look was radiant, while if he looked down his look 
was light-bearing. He could not touch any side of hu- 
man nature, that his soul did not go out in sympathy 
with it. 

The name of Christ globes in itself all the highest 
conceptions of self-sacrifice, of calm courage, of lustrous 
wisdom, without effort, without investigation, and in 
which is all gentleness, all fidelity, all love, tropical, im- 
mense, irresistible, and immeasurable. 

To the Christian Christ is the source of motive, the 
source of enthusiasm, the source of confident hope, the 
source of devout love, the source of patient continuance 
to the end. 

No man can read the Gospels without being im- 
pressed with the immense activity of Christ. 
14 



158 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



Christ was ready of speech to an extraordinary de- 
gree, but never talkative. He uttered sentences so crisp, 
so fresh, and so complete, that every one of them might 
be cherished as a proverb or as a rounded statement. 

There is such superiority, such gentleness, such 
sweetness, such sympathy, such patience, such faithful- 
ness of love in Christ, that one is ashamed of the best 
service he can render him, it is so far beneath his desert. 

The ministry of our Saviour was characterized, after 
it had once fully begun, by excessive activity. 

The maxims and statements of Christ were the very 
roots of philosophy. We have never, under any moral 
philosophy, come up to the maxims and root-teachings 
of the Lord Jesus. 

We are sorry for a man because he stumbles with a 
crippled limb. We can pity an outside cripple ; Christ 
could pity an inside cripple. 



THE SPIRIT OF GOD. 

The Divine Spirit works along the line of a man's 
own thinking power, along the channel of a man's own 
motive power, and wakes up in the man that which was 
in him. 

As the solar sun develops growth in the earth, so the 
influence of God develops growth in the human soul. 



The Spirit of God, 



159 



The Divine Mind does not think for us, or in spite of 
us, but works in us to think, and to will, and to do. 

There is a direct in- shining, a direct in-breathing, a 
direct in-reaching of the Divine Soul upon the human 
soul. 

Except by the personal influence of God's nature on 
ours, we can not reach our higher manhood. 

There is a heart-logic that is more than head-logic, 
and that saves a man in spite of his head. 

Men who wait for irresistible influence to transform 
them, with one mighty sweep, into Christians, are like 
the ship-master who waits for the wind to loose his cables 
and raise his anchors. 

Every throb of our spirits that answers to spiritual 
things is caused by the influence of God. 

There is a healing curative nature forever outworking 
from the Divine Mind upon ours, although we may not 
co-operate voluntarily with his will. 

The soul of God touches the soul of man. God and 
man are united by the intersphering of soul-life. God's 
ever-watchful soul broods tenderly over every human 
being by day and by night. 

The spirit has the poorest chance in this world where 
it has to work through an untransparent body. The 
ascended Christ is nearer the world than when he stood 
clothed in a body. 

The soul only when divinely brooded receives its 
power. Our faculties, like the eye that must be filled 
with light from without, wait for their power from above. 



160 Proverds from Plymouth PulpiL 

There is a spirit that works within us, and develops 
a power in us that teaches us how to accomplish what 
we will, and guides us by its inspiration to successful 
results. 

Softness is not the gentleness which the Spirit breeds, 
it is the weakness which the flesh breeds. 

Many people think that to be a Christian means sub- 
mission to restraints, oeing Long-faced, having a solemn 
countenance, just is a mask for caprices and fantasies. 
But the Spirit of God produces joy. 

Gentleness as the fruit of the Spirit is a strong man's 
treating all men with lenity, and kindness, and forbear- 
ance, and patience. 

Goodness as a fruit of the Divine Spirit is raining 
satisfaction and happiness upon all around us, not study- 
ing our own welfare ; a fountain out of which all the 
time flow streams of delight for others. 

Justice is very good, but that alone is like a heap of 
bones with nothing on them. Goodness is like the flesh 
by which bones are covered over. 

There is nothing so street as the s: fines s ana gentle- 
ness of power. 

Selfish man, who does not want to be selfish — that 
aspiration for something l etter, is of God. Worldly man, 
conscious of spiritual things — that consciousness is of 
God. 

There is no place where a soul can be, that to it is 
not conjoined the influences of the Divine Spirit. At- 
tempt anything, overcome anything, attain anything, you 
are not alone. 



The Spirit of God. 161 

There is a divine summer which broods upon men, 
and brings forth harvests in their souls. That we can 
not understand it, define the work of the Spirit, or limit 
it, is its glory. 

This may be called the creed of the Spirit : love, joy, 
peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meek- 
ness, temperance. 

What the sun is to flowers, that the Holy Ghost must 
be to our hearts if we would be Christians. 

There is a divine power which lapses into the human 
soul, and by that divine power all the faculties of a man 
become competent to do or to be what they can not do 
or be when they are left to the laws of society or to the 
laws of Nature. 

The soul may rise through all earthly influences into 
such a susceptible spiritual condition that the throb 
and impulse of the Divine Nature shall fall upon our 
souls and give us an abiding state of wisdom, of peace, 
of rest, and of joy in the Holy Ghost. 

It is the nature of the Spirit of God, it is the genius 
of the gospel of Jesus Christ, to change the whole current 
of human nature, and take a man of twoscore or three- 
score years of wickedness and to cleanse him in blood so 
that he shall be white as the driven snow. 



162 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



CHRISTIANITY. 

The world is out hunting — what ? Heathenism. 
And it will be unearthed ; it will be caught. A little 
while and there will be no den so deep, or forest so dark, 
or island so remote, that it can find refuge. 

If you are going to cut cold iron, you must have cold 
steel to do it with ; and, if you are going to do the Lord's 
work among wicked men, you must be a Puritan — you 
must be unflinching. 

Christianity is the making things strong, and sweet, 
and fruitful, and beautiful. Beauty, and liberty, and life, 
and power, belong to every single element to which a 
man is called in the Christian life. 

All Christianity which does not include personal ex- 
perience, is but a lunar rainbow. It takes the sun to 
make a rainbow worth looking at. 

There is no Christianity to the man who does not 
personally take Christ by faith. 

No man presents a type of Christianity who lives 
simply by force of duty. It is love, joyful living, not 
drudgery. 

t 

Men judge of Christians by taking as fair samples 
those that lie rotten on the ground. 

Some folks think that Christianity means a kind of 
insurance policy, and that it has little to do with this life, 
but that it is a very good thing when a man dies. 

A reflex light of Christianity shines all through so- 
ciety. 



Christianity, 



Christianity seeks to produce a certain inward con- 
dition which we call character, which is to last beyond 
death, and to be potential beyond the grave. 

The Sermon on the Mount is the foundation of those 
Christian doctrines which relate to the dispositions of 
men, to morality, to worship, and to spirituality. 

Science is now making the swaddling-clothes of 
Christianity. 

Christianity is simply the ideal form of manhood rep- 
resented to us by Jesus Christ. 

The Christianity that we need must have oaken sills 
and stone foundations — namely, truth, fidelity, honor, 
honesty, purity, continence, courage ; on these old, 
homely moral virtues, manhood must be established. 

Restfulness, trustfulness, peacefulness — in other 
words, the attributes of little children when they are at 
home with their parents and are free from anxiety and 
fear — these are the genius and nature of true Christianity. 

Christianity is nothing but the Hebrew economy car- 
ried out on a better plane and by better instruments. 



164 Proverbs from Plymouth Pzdpit. 



CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

God builds for every sinner, if he will but come 
back, a highway of golden promises from the depths of 
degradation and sin clear up to the Father's house. 

Wherever you have seen God pass, mark that spot, 
and go and sit in that window again. 

The test of Christian character should be that a man 
is a joy-bearing agent to the world. 

On the one side of the loom in which a Christian 
man's life is laid is sorrow, and on the other is joy ; and 
the shuttle, struck alternately by each, flies back and 
forth, carrying the thread, which is white or black, as 
the pattern needs. 

Christian graces should be like Croton water, which 
presses from the reservoir on every faucet in New York 
city. Each one should be full and ready for use when 
needed. 

God appoints our graces to be nurses to other men's 
weaknesses. 

It is not the love of things lovely and pure and 
noble, but the attitude of mind which leads us to pour 
the balm of our soul over those that are unlovely and 
impure and ignoble, that constitutes the mind and will 
of Christ in us. 

No moral quality is left in the New Testament until 
it has been embellished. It is not enough that a Chris- 
tian man should be generous, he must be cheerful in his 
generosity. 



Christian Life, 165 

A Christian man who hates, and is inexorable and 
revengeful, and will not forgive, is as much worse than 
an ordinary man as salt that has lost all saltness is worse 
than common dirt; it is only good for the bottom of 
one's foot. 

A religious life is as much a department of educa- 
tion as a musical life or a life of university instruction. 
It is a thing of growth and of gradual progress. Such 
is the method of the Divine Spirit. 

The method by which God stirs men up through the 
Holy Ghost to a better life is that of an education which 
is seed first, sprout next, then a larger growth, and then 
maturity. 

A week filled with selfishness, and the Sabbath stuffed 
full of religious exercises, will make a good Pharisee, but 
a poor Christian. 

There is a precise moment when the soul pauses in 
its departure from God, and begins to return toward 
him. The fruits of that return may not be at once 
visible. 

A moral man, as distinguished from a Christian man, 
is one who is negative. A Christian is one who is posi- 
tive. 

The Christian life is a life of higher activity — not of 
quiescence; a life of rebound from wickedness, within 
and without. 

A coat that is not used, the moths eat ; and a Chris- 
tian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted — 
the moths eat him ; and they have poor food at that. 



1 66 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

The methods of God with the soul are far above the 
crucible, and far above the measures which are ordinarily 
applied in science. 

As the trained sharer, though starting the tune below 
the pitch, glides into it, and goes with the current of 
song, so everywhere and always the human will that is 
swallowed up in the will of Christ Jesus, whatever may 
be the event, meets it and glides into concurrence and 
concord with it. 

When one comes into the mystic union with God, 
and feels the stimulating influence of the divine nature, 
he is dead to the lower life. 

A Christian may be set free from temptations by the 
inspiration and inflation of the upper faculties of the 
mind by the Holy Ghost ; and sin has no dominion over 
such a man. 

Christianity requires a forgiving spirit as the highest 
form of benevolence or well-wishing toward our fellow- 
men. 

In the Christ-man the powers of the soul, the powers 
of the understanding, of the will, of the moral senti- 
ments, of the affections, and of the passions, are all or- 
ganized for the purpose of benefit to others. 

A lazy saint is an anomaly in the universe, and will 
be found nowhere but in a fool's paradise. Business is 
morality. A man that has nothing to do can not be a 
good man. 

When a poor Christian man has passed from this 
world, he has not a pauper-soul but a Christ-soul in 
him. 



Christian Life, 



i6y 



Christian self-respect and Christian conscious power 
among the very poor, and Christian humility and Chris- 
tian gentleness and purity and sweetness among the 
rich — set these two pictures over against each other, 
and see which is the handsomer. 

It is a beautiful thing to see a man so poor that 
poverty despises him, and yet not humbled a particle by 
it ; to see a man that has such a sense of the dignity of 
the Christhood in him, that he walks among men with 
an unblenching face, every inch a man among them. 

The most celestial experiences of a Christian soul 
can only come forth during moods of happiness. 

The very point of power in the church of Christ is 
the personal influence of Christian- lives. 

A thousand men who should create a public senti- 
ment around them in favor of the higher forms of Chris- 
tian experience, by the example of their lives, would 
revolutionize a continent. 

Human souls transformed by the Spirit of God till 
they live in the highest qualities, must form a public 
sentiment that is to be the transforming power among 
men. 

When your babe puts his little soft hand into yours, 
his hand is as strong as yours, since it is yours that 
guides it ; so, when we put our hand into God's, we are, 
by his grace, as strong as he is, since he leads and we 
only follow. 

Christ can not be followed unless a man gives the 
benefit of his gifts and attainments to the whole com- 
munity. 



168 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

Men may come to Jesus Christ in such a sense as 
that they shall have a power, a charity, and an emo- 
tional life, which is able absolutely to dominate over all 
external conditions, so that men who are in sorrow rise 
up, the cause not being taken away. 

A Christian is a fruit-bearer. A moral man is a vine 
that does not bear fruit. 

How many there are that spend their lives in the 
midst of all the pleasing trifles of that vast museum of 
curiosities which are labeled religious, and think them- 
selves Christians ! 

To be a martyr requires a great deal of obstinacy as 
well as grace. There have been a great many stuffy 
martyrs. There have been martyrs outside of the Chris- 
tian religion as well as inside of it. 

If one could wallow amid filth for half a life, and 
then wash himself clean in a day, then sin would be no 
worse than dirt on the hands which water can cleanse 
in a minute. Repentance may begin instantly, but ref- 
ormation often requires a sphere of years. 

The suffer-me-first folk are not the ones to follow 
Christ. One says, "I will follow thee, but suffer me 
first — " " Stop ! " says the Saviour, " I do not want you 
unless you will follow me at once." 

Many Christians commit the mistake of wanting 
high feeling when it is against nature that they should 
have it. 

A man that is a Christian, and is a dark lantern, is 
not of the New Testament pattern. 



Christian Life. 169 



Half the spiritual difficulties that men and women 
suffer arise from a morbid state of health. 

Christians should kindle their zeal by sympathetic 
contact with other Christians. 

Any Christian that wants to chord any state of mind 
can do so if he is familiar with the hymn-book. 

Hymns are like trumpet-calls to a sleeping warrior, 
which wake him and instantly bring him to his feet, 
sword in hand. 

Heaven answers with us the same purpose that the 
tuning-fork does with the musician. Our affections, the 
whole orchestra of them, are apt to get below the con- 
cert-pitch ; and we take heaven to tune our hearts by. 

There are not anywhere else so many ways of trick- 
ery, so many false lights, so many veils, so many guises, 
so many illusive deceits, as are practiced in every man's 
conscience in respect to his motives, thoughts, feelings, 
conduct, and character. 

Man's faults lie like reptiles — like toads, like lizards, 
like serpents ; and what if there is over them the evening 
sky, lit with glory, and all aglow ? Are they less reptiles 
and toads because all is roseate around about them ? 

The notes of religious experience that ring out of the 
soul are notes gladder than marriage-bells. Religion is 
real if it is experimental. Religion is glorious, and ex- 
perimental religion is the most glorious of all. 

When we have heartily repented of wrong, we should 
let all the waves of forgetfulness roll over it, and go for- 
ward unburdened to meet the future. 
15 



170 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

Christians should be bright and beautiful through all 
their youthful life, and gorgeous as they grow old and 
are about to step into the kingdom of God's glory. 

" Behold ! he prayeth," may almost be said to be the 
description of the beginning of the Christian life. 

The great art of living Christianly is to have con- 
science for the undertone, and to have love for the upper, 
and, if possible, for the stronger experience. 

There is no point so critical of Christian character as 
the power to maintain love toward all men — not a love 
of personal attraction, but a love of benevolence, that 
begets a willingness to bear with them and work for them. 

The New Testament designs the Christian man to be 
a child of light and joy. 

Bearing fruit, sweet, luscious, and blessed, is the busi- 
ness of the Christian life. 

Though thousands love and earnestly, yet no one 
knows the whole want of his life till he has met with that 
which is a supply to all — mind to mind, heart to heart, 
faculty to faculty. It is only God who can satisfy the 
soul. 

Many Christians are like chestnuts — very pleasant 
nuts, but inclosed in very prickly burrs, which need vari- 
ous dealings of Nature, and her grip of frost, before the 
kernel is disclosed. 

Men's graces must get the better of their faults as a 
farmer's crops do of the weeds— by growth. 

Feeling does not become stronger in the religious life 
by waiting, but by using. 



Christian Life. 



171 



The passions are never doing their proper work unless 
they are like locomotives behind a train ; the functions 
of the passions in a Christian is to go behind conscience 
and love, and make them powerful and fruitful. 

There are unordained men that are ordained of God 
from their birth to be teachers in the way of religious 
conversation. 

A radiant piety, a loving piety, a hopeful piety, and 
above all a singing and praising piety, wins every class 
of men, and honors the name of Christ in the world. 

A man's soul ought to be as the heavens were on the 
night when the shepherds looked up, and saw them full 
of angels as well as stars. 

If a man could take his choice of all the lives that 
are possible on the earth, there is none so much to be 
desired for its joy-producing quality as a truly self-deny- 
ing, consecrated Christian life. 

Christians should serve their Saviour from day to day 
with an unfearing faith, a faith that works by love and 
its concomitant feelings; and they should keep their 
most royal hours and most golden moods for his service. 

It is a pitiful sight to see a man valiant for Satan, 
fruitful, energetic, and constantly diversifying his experi- 
ence in wickedness, and afterward very softly spoken for 
God, sterile, and close, and formal, and proper, when he 
becomes a Christian. 

No man ought to be so glad to pluck men out of the 
burning as those men who have been themselves brands 
in the burning, and have been rescued. 



172 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

The profession a man makes when he joins the 
church is, " I am better." Not " I am good," but " I am 
better, and I am going to get well." 

How unmanly and dishonorable it is that a great sin- 
ner should accept grace, and then be a dwarf in God's 
work, when he has been a giant in the work of sin ! 

Supreme and tremendous energy and positiveness 
enter into the scriptural delineations of Christian char- 
acter. Intense virtues and self-denials, bearing yokes, 
bearing the cross, sacrificing, crucifying, are enjoined. 

The moment a man really wants to be a Christian, he 
is one ; wishing is having. 

There are persons with a main-spring in them, who 
have been wound up, and only need to be taken up and 
whirled round a few times, and to be told, " You are 
Christians : tick, tick," and they would commence keep- 
ing time, and go on keeping time. 

God prefers to administer in his moral kingdom by 
the operation of stated laws, just as he does in the phys- 
ical kingdom ; and the road to blessings in the moral 
kingdom of God is through an intelligent obedience to 
natural moral laws. 

Whenever a man asks God for any spiritual gift, the 
next step should be to ask : " Have I not asked God for 
something that I can get myself?" "Have I not asked 
God for something that he has made provision to give 
me in an indirect way ? " 

Many men, by their very culture and refinement, take 
themselves out of the fundamental element of sympathy 
and love which is indispensable to Christian life. 



Christian Life. 



173 



Those that follow Christ do not go about patting 
men, and making soft pillows for them to put their heads 
on, and easy cushions for them to sit down on, and sweet 
music for them to do their iniquities in. The men es- 
pecially who follow Christ and his apostles turn the 
world upside down. 

The desire to dress better than can be afforded is 
taking off the very eliamel of people's virtue, and taking 
out the very stamina of their religious life. Ostentatious 
vanity in dress has ruined many a family, and damned 
many a soul. 

An error is not always to be plucked up by the roots 
in a man, unless something else can be put in its place. 

A hundred men associated in fellowship, who pre- 
sented absolutely a perfect and symmetrical view of the 
sweetness of Christian character as Christ had it and 
imposed it upon his followers, would revolutionize any 
city. 

Ten men that walked in the radiant beauty of holi- 
ness would regenerate any neighborhood. 

Christians ought not to slander God by looking as if 
they were at an everlasting funeral. 

That man is a Christian whose soul has learned to 
love ; and he who has not learned to love, does not know 
the alphabet of Christianity. 

To be a Christian a man must have his selfishness 
stopped, his unloving pride stabbed, his opaque soul illu- 
mined, and all through the central element of love. 

Hundreds of professed Christians are nothing but 
skin over empty space, beaten with orthodox sticks. 



174 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

The soul may be so inspired by the Divine Spirit as 
to be certified of its relationship to God. 

Eternal life is not a gift as of something out of the 
hand of God, like a scepter, or like a coronet. It is a 
gift as education is ; something wrought patiently and 
long in a man. It is a gift as the sunlight is to the 
flowers — an influence which enters into them and fash- 
ions them. 

Feeling, which, beginning a feeling, has transmuted 
itself into life and conduct, and has become wholesome — 
that is genuine piety. But the mere feeling without the 
transmutation is not desirable. 

Five pounds more steam than a man wants is five 
pounds against him — not five pounds for him, Every 
particle of feeling more than can be reduced to conduct 
and volition is so much surplusage. 

It is not necessary, in order to be true Christians, to 
be in a hymn state, a psalm state, a prayer state, all the 
time. 

In the Christian life the yoke and the burden are 
eminently profitable to men. 

For conversion a man wants just enough feeling to 
make him thoroughly turn away from bad and thoroughly 
take hold of good. Whatever is more than that is sur- 
plusage. 

The less feeling it takes to convert a man, the more 
noble he is ; and the more it takes, the meaner he is. 

A true Christian must live higher than the average 
morality of the community in which he dwells. 



Christian Life. 



175 



No man has touched the essential characteristic of 
Christianity, and no man has entered into the interior 
spirit of Christianity, who has not reached to a certain 
extent that peace which Christ said he gave to his disci- 
ples, and which at times they declared to be past all un- 
derstanding. 

A man who has religion is a whiter man inside and 
out, a riper man inside and out, a sweeter man inside 
and out, and a more fragrant man inside and out, than a 
man who has not religion. 

The jolly good fellow who took to everybody and 
whom everybody liked gets religion, and now the singu- 
lar consequence is that whereas he used to be like a 
merry shower he is now nothing but an icicle hanging 
from the eaves of the church, cold, formal, and good for 
nothing. 

Christ is better disclosed in the effort to live Chris- 
tianly than he is by any other endeavor to find him. 
Begin Christian life and duty at once ; begin at once to 
cultivate Christian feeling. 

A true man is not what he is in the prayer-meeting, 
nor what he is in the Sunday-school, nor what he is in 
his best moments, but what his average life is in all his 
hours put together. 

God's men are better than the devil's men, and they 
ought to act as though they thought they were. 

Christians are not called to a singing hope, an easy 
spiritual life. They are called to join the host that 
mean yet, one day, to see truth, conscience, love, gener- 
osity, honor, and purity, taking complete control of the 
machinery of human life. 



176 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 



What a fly is whose head is cut off, that has no steer- 
ing power, and, using its wings and legs, whirls round 
and round preliminary to dying, that a man is who has 
lost his faith. 

God should be in the Christian's soul, in his living 
consciousness, vital, active, fiery. He should inspire him 
and fill him with admiration. His God should be one 
that loves him, inspires him, rebukes him, punishes him, 
wounds him, heals him, and rejoices him — one whose 
arms and whose bosom he feels. 

" The fruit of the spirit is love — joy." So the opaque 
Christian is a slander on God. The thing which the 
Church has been so much afraid of — joy, cheerfulness, 
hopefulness, gentleness, sweetness, overflowing manhood 
— this is one of the fruits of the Spirit. Love and joy 
are put first. 

It is by the side of sickness, and in the refuge of 
home, that we see the power of the Lord Jesus Christ 
more signally than in the street, in the halls of legislation, 
or in any of the conspicuous places of life. 

There is nothing that is a greater blessing in a com- 
munity than a man who is known to be an honest, truth- 
speaking man, and who is kind and genial and cheerful 
everywhere and at all times. Such a man will do more 
good in a community than a thousand tight-laced, sour- 
visaged Christian men. 

Man is so essentially a believing animal, that the 
moment you- take faith away from him, you take away 
an element indispensable to his spiritual and so to his 
normal life. 



Christian Life. 



177 



Conscience is the Christian's feet, and they touch the 
earth, but love is the head, lifted up toward heaven ; 
now the head would certainly do ill without the feet, but 
the feet still worse without the head. 

As it is not the child always hanging round the 
mother's neck that gives the strongest proof of affection, 
but the child that obeys the mother's command, so the 
Christian who obeys Christ shows him the greatest love. 

Keep the thought of heaven to grow timber to bridge 
over the bad places in life. 

The true Christian is the largest built of any living 
man, is the creature of the greatest joy, and is by far the 
one who has the greatest liberty. 

Self-denial is only the higher feelings putting the whip 
on a lower one, because it is impudent and is disturbing 
the soul. 

It is no virtue to be patient down-hill. To be patient 
with men is to be patient with the whole sum of human 
infirmities. 

The life of every Christian on earth has in it much 
that is mysterious. It is aiming at an awful grandeur 
which has never been unveiled. God carries in his 
bosom the full ideal. We know it not. 

A Christian ought not to be gloomy-eyed, twilight- 
faced, and bat-like, hovering between night and day. 

No one can resist the argument of holiness, brought 
in a personified form before him, in its gentleness, in its 
sweetness, in its aspiration, in its love, in all its blossoms 
and fruits of peace and joy. 



178 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

There is a cowardly, white-faced spirit of professional 
piety in the world. 

There is an infidel " don't care," which is the devil's 
net to catch the heedless; and there is a Christian 
" don't care," which is a cord of God to draw men to- 
ward heaven. 

Christian character can never be according to the 
Scripture ideal, which is only an inventory of nega- 
tions. 

No man can have a manly Christian character who 
is merely reserved, restrictive, conservative. 

Righteousness is as hereditary as vice, and godly 
men transmit moral qualities to their children, and to 
their children's children. 

The Christian gathers hope from the feeling, " I am 
not to be saved because I am so good, but because God 
is so good." 

Being a Christian is no mysterious thing. If you 
would feel like a Christian, act like one, live like one. 
The way to become a Christian is to do Christian duty. 

It is not conviction so much as the fruit of convic- 
tion that is of importance. 

The human heart has more gates than Jerusalem 
had, and God enters it by that gate which, in view of 
the age, circumstances, and condition of the person, it 
seems to him wisest to enter by. 

A religious life, begun early, is the surest road to 
honor, prosperity, and happiness. 



Christian Life, 



179 



We should be ashamed of anybody that is afraid of 
God's providence. We should sing when other people 
cry. Men that have lead in their shoes generally have 
it in their heads too. 

A Christian life is not a sluggish, lazy, puddle-life. 

A dull axe never loves grindstones, but a keen work- 
man does. God grinds the axes he means to use. 

Give me a hundred right kind of Christians, and I 
will bind them into a living volume, and I will make the 
world believe. 

A man that does nothing but watch evil, never will 
overcome it. 

There is a Providence — a broad, beneficent system, 
which has such a relation to you that you can not afford 
to be uneasy. 

You can trust and rest in God simply because he has 
said, you may and you must. 

Out of every night God is making a path by his hand 
for the morning, and for you ; and out of every day he 
is making a bed of darkness for the night, and for you. 

Adversity is the mint in which God stamps upon 
man his image and superscription. 

So much of the gospel as has been reproduced in a 
living form in Christian people's experience is what the 
world needs more than almost anything else. 

The Christian needs a broader conception of Chris- i 
tian life than merely saying prayers, singing hymns, and 
talking to men about their souls. 



180 Proverbs from Plymouth PulpiL 

A well-bred, thoroughly trained Christian addresses 
himself to duties that he does not feel an appetite for ; 
and frequently, in performing them, his dislike for them 
disappears. 

There are not only two strings to the Christian's bow, 
but thirty in the Christian life. 

The greatest joys of Christian men spring from those 
friendships which have grown up in the Church in con- 
nection with religious feelings and labors. 

There is no friendship so pure and unsullied as that 
which is formed by Christians while they travel together 
homeward toward Zion. 

It is a Christian duty in every man to organize his 
affairs so as to enlarge and make more and more bounti- 
ful the property foundation on which his household 
stands — for property is the absolute condition of civili- 
zation. 

Christian graces are air-plants which do not need 
dirt to root in. Moralities are good crops — oats, wheat, 
and what-not — although they root in the dirt. But we 
need to have both. 

A flower might just as well attempt to get along in 
summer without the dew that falls upon it, as a Chris- 
tian attempt to live without daily communion with God. 

An eagle that can not fly, a nightingale that can not 
sing, a vine that can not bear grapes, a flower that can 
not blossom — that is a heart that does not pray, and 
does not love to pray. 

The sculpturing hand of God cuts the hard stone, 
and brings out the features of the new man. 



Christian Life. 181 

Whoever draws near to God in the spirit of sincere, 
winning, loving, filial conversation, worships. This is 
prayer, this is communion, whatever may be the mode. 

More graces of the spirit, a thousand times, are sacri- 
ficed by irritableness, which comes from over-exertion 
and inordinate activity, than can be gained by prayers 
and reading. 

Humility is not a stoled and draped nun clothed in 
black, and downward-looking. No man is humble who 
is looking down. A man is humble when he compares 
what he is with what he would be. 

Humility is a head-up quality — not a dragging, 
miserable, mean feeling. It is not mortified pride. It 
is one of the noblest and one of the most resplendent of 
all the experiences of the soul. 

Temptation and suffering so much belong to the 
Christian life that they who have none of these conflicts 
have no right to suppose that they are Christians. 

Society defends itself by its hating power; and so- 
ciety is to be taught how discreetly to hate evil by the 
witness and testimony of Christian men. 

The Lord's day is a day of mercy, and is more broken 
by rigor without sympathy than it is by mercy with 
laxity. 

When a man says that he is perfect already, there is 
only one of two places for him, and that is heaven or 
the lunatic asylum. 

Of all battles, there are none like the unrecorded 

battles of the soul. 
16 



1 82 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

What the parlor is to the house, the Christian's Lord's 
day is to the week. The week is a house, and Sunday is 
the best room in it, and it ought to have the best things 
put into it, and it ought to be kept religiously. 

Sunday says to that in men which is secular and 
animal, " Rest " ; and to that which is intellectual and 
moral and social, "Grow." 

Suffering rightly borne weakens the weak part of us, 
and strengthens that which is strong. 

Many conversions only crack the shell. Paul was 
converted as the germ of a peach sprouts ; it splits its 
shell clear off. 

Christian graces are natural faculties which have 
blossomed under the influence of divine love. 

Walk through to-day, child of God, as well as you 
can, and God will undertake for your future. 

Too much looking backward and inward is bad for 
piety and progress. 

Consecrating the life to Christ is not giving up all 
the pleasures and beauties of life. 

It is not by fits and starts of conduct that we are to 
be judged, but by its whole course. 

There is no single pleasure that a manly man ought 
to love the flavor of, which is not permissible to a Chris- 
tian. Piety does not shut up the avenues of enjoyment. 

We are not to suppose that they only are Christians 
who are beautiful Christians, or who are embellished 
with all the Christian graces. 



Christian Life, 



183 



No man ever came to a state of Christian eminence 
by waiting and praying alone. 

A man must be trained and drilled into humility, as 
a soldier is drilled into military movements. 

Every Christian grace must be put to school ; it must 
be bound out to apprenticeship. Men do not go to sleep 
under the Spirit of God a violet dry, and wake up a vio- 
let wet and beautiful. 

When a man keeps a journal of his religious experi- 
ence, he never will lack a fool's looking-glass. 

The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, 
nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness 
in the present and in promise. 

No man's heart ever grew rich, no man's heart ever 
had a God-touch in it, until he had learned to see God 
as one whom he loves. 

A Christian just born into the kingdom is often like 
a loaf of bread when its materials are just put together. 

The proof that the sheep belongs to the shepherd is 
that the shepherd bought him and takes care of him. 

The men who walk in lonely places, thinking only of 
God and the angels, are not the most reliable Christians 
— are not the bone and sinew of the Church. 

Christians should be like a flower-store : the odor of 
sanctity should betray them wherever they are. 

If you want to be a Christian, begin this instant to 
love God, and to act like a Christian. 



1 84 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 



The highest form of conversion is where men in- 
stantly feel the goodness and the beauty of the Saviour, 
and, with hardly a thought of self, run to Christ and 
offer him themselves. 

Gloom bears the same relations to piety that rust 
does to the sword-blade — it eats into it. The Christian 
is to exercise the lively emotions. 

We only see in a lifetime a dozen faces marked with 
the peace of a contented spirit. 

Grace is only nature blossomed out ; nature won and 
warmed into its true growth. 

Christians are like vases, they must pass through the 
fire ere they can shine. The graces which are to be 
their everlasting beauty and glory must be burned in. 

The love of God shed abroad in the soul surpasses 
all fragrance in inexhaustible diffusiveness. 

It is not enough for a man to have an idea of truth — 
he needs to have a moral shock that shall electrify his 
being, and give to the truth instantaneous and over- 
whelming power. The enthusiasm comes from God. 
Like other gifts, it comes instrumentally. 

The legitimate end of the ordained ministry is to 
evolve a social religious ministering power in the con- 
gregation. 

The supremest power of divine truth is not when it 
is uttered in idea-form, but when exhibited in heart- 
form, or as it is evolved in actual life-experience. 

It will not do to be saints at meeting and sinners 
everywhere else. 



Christian Life. 



A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put 
himself to school, to Christ, for the honest purpose of 
becoming better. 

It is easier to reform any vice by becoming a Chris- 
tian at once, than to attempt it from a lower motive. A 
man who tries to reform without the help of God is like 
the man who tries to breathe without air. 

You can not be a perfect Christian in a moment, but 
you can begin to be an imperfect Christian in a mo- 
ment. 

A Christian needs to be alarmed when he has a great 
deal of good feeling and but little of good works. 

Everybody has his bete noir, and Christians have 
theirs. We are brought up to hate the devil, and devil 
is the name for whatever we do hate. Our little Chris- 
tian devils are — other denominations. 

Men should fill their hearts with a sense of fidelity, 
of generosity, and of obedience to God ; and then let 
God take care of the result. 

If a man repeats his credo, or his ave, or his pater- 
noster, and is made more devout, it does him good in 
proportion as it makes him more devout. If a proud 
man performs penances and mortifications, and it hum- 
bles him, it does him good so far as it humbles him. 

Unfruitful emotion is to be suspected. Feeling acts 
as an impulse, as a spur, as a spring, and when feelings 
are excited, and they put nothing forward, they are some- 
times even dangerous to a man. 

There are multitudes of men converted whose con- 
dition you can not determine by what you see of them. 



1 86 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



Every one of the Christian traits — humility, meek- 
ness, gentleness, patience, aspiration, obedience — is a 
development requiring training, drill. 

There is in the universe a provision by which men 
are helped by the Divine Spirit. God inspires us to the 
Christian life, and helps to the development of its graces. 

A revival is nothing but a school for the education 
of the moral feelings, and is exactly adapted to the ne- 
cessities of many men. 

Love to God is the slowest development to mature 
in the soul. No man ever learned to love God with all 
his heart, and his neighbor as himself, in a day. 

The great elements of Christian life are wrought out 
in men little by little. They are never suddenly pro- 
duced. 

We do not mean by a Christian a man that prays 
well, and sings well, and goes booming up like a rocket 
every once in a while — that is not what we mean by a 
Christian. 

Love and faith at white heat are irresistible. 

A man that is a Christian is not necessarily a man 
that is rapturous in devotion ; rapture is not the charac- 
teristic feature of Christianity. 

Something to do, occupation, if one has great force 
of nature, is indispensable to the highest form of virtue, 
to safety, and to the development of the whole realm of 
spirituality in the human soul. 

Suffering may be a rod to chastise; it may be a 
scepter to empower. Make it a scepter. 



Christian Life. 



i8 7 



Put the saddle of patience on your back, and say to 
Suffering, " Mount and ride me," and take the bit in your 
mouth and be ''exercised." Be broken, be trained, be 
disciplined. Go through the drill. 

God crowns his soldiers after many campaigns and 
much night-and-day work. It is after they have been 
toughened in the struggle, and have come out veterans. 

It is no harder to be a Christian than not to be one. 

Early Christian experience is a single instrument 
playing ; late Christian experience, where it is genuine, 
is a band of twenty instruments playing in harmony. 

A man living rightly in his inward life, with his soul 
turned reverentially toward God, showing that his dis- 
positions are just and loving toward man, is a Christian. 

No man can afford to violate the unwritten customs 
of etiquette, who wishes to act as a Christian gentleman. 

An unforgiving spirit puts a man further from God 
than any other thing. 

There never was a period in the history of the world 
when there were so many high-toned and pure Christian 
families as to-day. 

No man has a sense of God present with him upon 
a dull nerve, upon a low-toned or moderate state of 
feeling. 

The pure in heart, the love-men in all sects and in 
all churches, are gods. 

There is danger of substituting activity for the loving 
graces. 



1 88 Proverbs from Plymouth Ptdpit. 



That which constitute the power of the gospel are 
divine dispositions, sanctified hearts, and glorified love. 

There is great danger of an external rattling activity 
which shall leave the heart cold and cheerless within. 

A Christian must stay in the world and make it bet- 
ter ; that was what Christ meant when he prayed, " I pray 
not that thou shouldst take them out of the world." 

A fragrant flower fills the house with fragrance. You 
do not need to see it to know that it is near. So with 
Christian example. 

Soul-aches are beneficial ; but bodily aches are not. 
Nobody is made a saint by rheumatism or neuralgia. 

When men have been brought into the Church, they 
have only begun. They are just in the alphabet. 

Supreme allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ is the 
primary act, which prepares the way for all the other 
steps which secure the salvation of men. 

God puts the excess of hope in one man, in order 
that it may be a medicine to the man who is despondent. 

The things that we are permitted to see in this life 
are but intimations, glimpses, of what we shall see here- 
after. 

The central faculty which warms, incites, and intense- 
ly influences the American mind, is hope. 

Blessed is the society that is full of hopeful men. 
Hope perverted is one of man's greatest curses. 

No grief has a right to immortality. That ground 
belongs to joy, to hope, to faith. 



Christian Life. 



The Christian religion stands contrasted with all 
other faiths by the superabundant elements of cheer and 
hope and comfort in it. 

The greatest architect and the one most needed is 
Hope. It builds with the flimsiest material — the fancy. 

Hope is sweet-minded and sweet-eyed. It draws pict- 
ures ; it weaves fancies ; it fills the future with delight. 

Faith means a sanctified imagination, or the imagina- 
tion applied to spiritual things. 

Faith is a recognition of those things which are above 
the senses — the supersensuous realm which includes 
divine existence, the heavenly state, the sphere of angelic 
life, where dwell the spirits of just men made perfect. * 

A clear disclosure of a life higher than this would 
tend to defeat that education for which this life was in- 
stituted. 

Faith is simply the belief of things not present to the 
senses. What is taken by faith, reason must interpret. 

A man is bound to believe not only sincerely but 
correctly. 

Faith is the realization of an invisible presence or 
truth. 

The gift of faith with some is low and faint, and some 
have it strong and overpowering. 

The highest order that was ever instituted on earth 
is the order of faith. 

It is how much of the invisible that we bring into 
this life that makes this life rich and valuable. 



190 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

When Christ said, " The last shall be first," he meant 
those persons never known outside their own neighbor- 
hood or their own home, who, in the midst of disappoint- 
ments and adversities, carried themselves with supreme 
fidelity toward God. 

There is no greater sweetness in this world than that 
of learning, and learning implicitly, to follow, provided 
you have one to follow who calls out your respect and 
inspires your confidence and your love. 

Faith is nothing but spiritualized imagination. 

He that is living by the body is living out everything. 
He is like a candle that is burning down in the socket. 
But he that is living by the spirit is living toward every- 
thing — hope, joy, fullness, refinement, elevation, grandeur. 

Never a man wiped his dirty lip of beer or his dainty 
lip of wine, who needed not afterward to wash his lip 
with water. 

Drinking is the devil's key ; and there is not a lock 
of evil that it does not unlock. 

Rum and reading are the two cheapest commodities 
of the globe. 

The worst of all luck is to be a sluggard, a knave, or 
a tippler. 

Intoxicating liquors are most apt to take hold of 
those who are most precious, and to let alone those who 
are least so. 

No man really ever prospers in this world who vio- 
lates the law of temperance or the law of God in the 
great matter of purity. 



Christian Life. 



In the end the sober always pay for the intemperate ; 
the pure pay the expenses of the debauched ; the honest 
man pays for the knave's debts. 

One of the first remunerations of general temperance 
is this : that it sets the understanding like a lighthouse 
on the top of the head, and gives a clear and full use of 
all the faculties. 

Gluttony, intemperance, sluggishness induced by 
oversleep, and the draining of the system by an inordi- 
nate indulgence of the passions, dull the reason, and 
make a man slow and inefficient. 

A man who has lived a drunken or lustful life has 
not the sensibility, the purity, or the moral stamina that 
he ought to have. 

Laughing is as divine as crying. Joy is more divine 
than sorrow ; for joy is bread, and sorrow is medicine. 

Woe be to the man that puts angels' wings on devils' 
qualities ! Wherever you go, if God gave you gayety 
and cheer of spirits, shine and sing. 

All physical pleasures are momentary, however in- 
tense they may be, and there is very little memory of 
them. 

Excitement comes from our lower passions ; but joy 
comes only from our sentiments. 

If a man has sought first and chiefly the soul's treas- 
ure — goodness, kindness, gentleness, devoutness, cheer- 
fulness, hope, faith, and love — he will extract more joy 
from the poorest furniture and outfitting of life than 
otherwise he could get from the whole world. 



192 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe 
in it. Grim care, moroseness, anxiety — all this rust of 
life ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth. It is 
better than emery. 

Saintly life, angelic life in heaven must be the sweetest, 
the gayest, the most joyous, the most full in every mood 
of fancy and of goodness. The blessed there carry light 
in the eye, joy in the heart, and ecstasy in every touch. 

Blessed is he who has a sense of the humorous. He 
has that which is worth more than money. 

Some joys are like sugar when there is just enough to 
flavor that into which you put it without revealing itself. 

The fugitive, brief, though intense satisfactions that 
come to the nerves through the appetite and passions 
are not the foundations of joy in this world : they come 
with a moment's flash, and are disastrous in their flight. 

The largest proportion of the happiness experienced 
among men on earth has been derived from social rela- 
tionships. 

The genius of Christianity pivots on joy. It is sweet, 
benign, joyful — not dark, painful, and ascetic. 

It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim 
milk. 

Praying can no more be made a substitute for smil- 
ing than smiling can for praying. 

Praying for others sweetens the disposition, and 
takes away every particle of the raven of scandal that 
loves to feed on carrion. 



Christian Life. 



193 



There is no harder shield for the devil to pierce with 
temptation than singing with prayer. 

The laws of Nature are fixed on purpose to be used 
for the granting of prayer. 

There is no characteristic of the new life more strik- 
ing than the disposition which it develops in a man to 
prayer. 

There are gifts of prayer that inhere in the original 
construction of some minds. The devotional tendency, 
which expresses itself in prayer, is sometimes a matter of 
original birth, and there are praying natures. But these 
cases are rare and exceptional. 

God winnows our prayers, lets the chaff fly, and saves 
the wheat. 

Christians pray on the principle that wine knocks the 
cork out of a bottle. There is an inward fermentation, 
and there must be a vent somewhere. It is the soul that 
prays first, the tongue wags afterward. 

When one finds himself in a disposition that comes 
oftener and oftener, that is spontaneous, and that rises 
through an atmosphere of sympathizing love toward God, 
that atmospheric condition of the soul is the witness of 
God that he is his son. 

Pearls grow in the most ungainly houses ; and so we 
shall find the serenest souls, and the wisest, in the most 
unlikely places. If sorrow and poverty, and all sur- 
rounding vulgarities, disfigure ninety-nine, there will be 
found the hundredth, shining like a light, pure as a star 
in darkness. 

!7 



194 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

No man is made a Christian once and forever. 

There is no error greater than that of supposing that, 
when a man is once converted and brought into the 
Church, he is safe. 



WICKEDNESS. 

Society is knee-deep with men who have no other 
function in life than to destroy their fellow-men. 

Men that do not do any good are sinners, just as the 
North Pole is a sinner, which has no summer, which is 
mighty in chilliness, which is ice, which is winter. 

More than mosquitoes in summer are the thoughts 
of dishonesty that are round about a brain that naturally 
tends to be dishonest. 

Our jails, taking the country through, are a disgrace 
to a civilized world and a civilized community. 

Evil is eternal in the sight of God unless checked 
and cured ; sin, like a poisonous weed, resows itself 
and becomes eternal by reproduction. 

We never sin by evil faculties, but always by good 
ones misemployed. The simple overacting of good 
makes it mischievous. 

When men are wicked, heady, obstinate, and under 
the full impetus of sin, they do not consider. That is 
one of the peculiar traits of wickedness. 



Wickedness. 



195 



Men may spend a long life without an indictable 
action, and without an honest one. 

There is no place in a man's whole life where he 
needs to be so abrupt, so peremptory, as in breaking off 
from wickedness. 

Instantaneousness is an indispensable element of 
health for a man who desires to turn away from an evil 
course. 

Many people keep their old sins warm, while they go 
to try on virtue, and see if they like it. Such a reforma- 
tion is a sham. 

Men repent toward the frigid zones ; they think that 
to go to God is dreary and desolate in the extreme. It 
is not. 

As the dew-laden bushes shake the drops from their 
leaves, so at one bound our hearts may shake off their 
burdens. 

It is better for a man whose garments are denied to 
take off the whole suit, and put on another, than to un- 
dertake to clean, spot by spot, with the garments on 
him. 

There is nothing in this world which more men are 
mistaken about than the possibility of being wicked un- 
derhandedly, and having good on the top of it ; as a 
loaf of heavy cake may be coated with sugar. 

As an eel, if he were to wiggle across the carpet, 
would leave a slime which no brush could take off, so 
there are many things which no person can know and 
ever recover from the knowledge of. 



196 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

No man becomes desperately criminal until he has 
been genteelly criminal. 

A speculator on the Exchange and a gambler at his 
table follow one vocation, only with different instru- 
ments. 

Idle men's imaginations are full of unlawful com- 
pany. 

Salacious imaginations, villainous pictures, harlot 
snuff-boxes, and illicit familiarities lead thousands to 
her door whose house is the way to hell. 

In every community three things always work to- 
gether, the grog-shop, the jail, the gallows— an infernal 
trinity. 

Vices, like weeds, ask little strewing, except what 
the wind gives their ripe and winged seeds, shaking and 
scattering them all abroad. 

Indolence as surely runs to dishonesty as to lying. 

The last results of idleness are abhorred, but it is 
not perceived that the first steps lead to the last. 

Every young man carries by nature a breast of pas- 
sions just such as bad men have, and should not allow 
wicked men to approach to seduce him. 

There is but one resource for innocence among men 
or women, and that is an embargo upon all commerce 
of bad men. 

All the shameless atrocities of wicked men are noth- 
ing to their heartlessness toward each other when broken 
down. 



Wickedness. 



197 



Sin is sweet in the mouth and bitter in digestion. 
It lies hard on the stomach. He who lives for the 
senses takes only one single kind of enjoyment, and so 
employs that that it destroys all the rest. 

It is impossible to put bad men together and not 
have them grow worse. 

Wickedness in society is all the time seeking to gain 
ascendency ; and there is nothing to keep it down but 
the hatred of it which the educated conscience of society 
gives. 

There is no escape from the mournful, melancholy 
fact that the whole race is sinful. 

Men who prosper by wickedness lose their capacity 
of enjoyment. 

A man's evil habits make the capital with which he 
will begin in the life to come. 

There is to be a day of reckoning. There is a judg- 
ment-day in the bones, and in the nerves, and in the 
stomach ; in the heart and in the brain. 

There are many men who would not blaspheme — oh, 
no ! but they will use cowards' oaths. They will not 
say, " By Jehovah ! " but they will say, " By Jupiter ! " 

Nothing in this world is so heartless as men who have 
had fellowship in vice together. 

Envyings, jealousies, selfishness, self-seeking, infect 
the atmosphere we breathe. These dispositions are sand 
in the teeth. 

No man is more cheated than the selfish man. 



198 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

Such ugly-quilled dispositions as obstinacy, arro- 
gance, self-opinionated ways, sneering, critical, cynical, 
teasing, disputative dispositions, are hateful and produce 
hate. 

The tiger, the wolf, and the serpent, lie low in the 
base of the human brain. Civilization and true Chris- 
tianity tame them and keep them down. 

Some men sin as foxes do. Some men sin as ser- 
pents do. Every man will sin according to his own 
nature and disposition. 

A man may be a saint on his back who is a devil on 
his feet. 

The prosperity of wicked men is like opium-eating. 
When men eat opium, they at first experience feelings of 
ecstasy, and have a glorious hour or two ; but then comes 
purgatory on earth. 

God assures us that, whatever wicked men may at- 
tempt to do, the constitution of things is against them, 
and the wrath of God is revealed against all unrighteous- 
ness. 

God says distinctly : " My face is against hot-blooded 
cruelty and passion, and lust, and sensuousness, and ava- 
rice, and all intemperance, and everything that takes 
away from the beauty, and the sweetness, and the music 
of the soul. I hate them all." 

The wisest laws can not pen up a man that is a rogue. 
As water put into a globe of ten-inch steel, and subjected 
to pressure, will penetrate the steel, stealing will penetrate 
any amount of law if you have a rogue in the center and 
subject him to the pressure of temptation. 



The Church. 



199 



Do not envy wicked men ! God sends thunder-bolts 
after them. 

A small penalty that is sure and quick will do more 
to restrain men from the commission of crime than the 
thunder of a judgment-day, with all the apparatus of 
omnipotence, flaming in the far future. 



THE CHURCH. 

They are the descendants, the lineal successors, of 
the apostles, who are like them in heart — not those who 
have some sort of touch on the shell. 

A man had better be a John, and go into the wilder- 
ness, clothed in camel's hair, and eating locusts and wild 
honey, than to be a fat minister in a fat pulpit, support- 
ing himself luxuriously by betraying God and playing 
into the hands of the devil. 

The Church is not a gallery for the better exhibition 
of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of 
imperfect ones, a nursery for the care of weak ones, a 
hospital for the better healing of those who need assidu- 
ous care. 

The perfection of the church is never to be found 
in its lower forms of stupid union. It is to be found, 
if anywhere, in a splendid divergence of thought and 
feeling. 



2oo Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



A church should be used as an hotel — not to live in, 
but to take food and refreshment in, on our way to our 
Father's house. 

Churches are God's hotels, where travelers put up for 
the night, as it were, and then speed on their way home. 
Christ is the one door. 

A sermon is good that has power on the heart, and is 
good for nothing, no matter how good, that has no moral 
power on man. 

There is no denomination that loves Christ more 
than it loves the organization of religion on earth. 

It is a wonder the true names are not put up over 
some churches : " Church of the Lucky Families " — 
" Church of the First Class "-— " Church of People that 
are not Vulgar" — "Church of Prosperous Men" — 
" Church of the Long Purse." 

The integrity of a church is to be judged by its 
spirit toward the poor in its own and every neighbor- 
hood. 

The spirit of any church whose sole thought is to 
take care of its own communicants, is not the spirit of 
Christ. 

Churches should be schools of friendship. 

People in the Church are like persons riding in a 
stage all night. When day breaks and they look at one 
another, behold ! they discover that they are friends, and, 
it may be, near relations. 

It is not the dogma preached, but the spirit in which 
it is preached, that constitutes Christianity in a church. 



The Church. 



20I 



To attempt to make the Church a spiritual Noah's 
ark — an organization for every element in human life — 
is to load the Church down at such a rate that it can 
never live and travel. 

The Church is a stimulating, vitalizing point of influ- 
ence ; but it can not undertake the management of all 
those interests which are developed by its vitality — it is a 
power, a stimulating influence, as light and heat are. 

Preaching, the living voice, to touch and arouse liv- 
ing men, is just as necessary here as it is in the islands 
of the sea, or in Africa ; it is just as necessary now as it 
was ages ago. 

Generally, when a church passes from a lower to a 
higher plane, there is one generation of doubters or 
infidels. 

A church is corrupted when it wants Christianity for 
its own peace, and not for the amelioration of persons 
that are not members of it. 

A bucket whose bottom has dropped out will not 
hold water ; and a church whose poor have dropped out 
will not hold grace. 

If a preacher stands in the sacred desk with all the 
resources of the gospel, and speaks without interesting 
his hearers, it is because he does not know how to han- 
dle his tools. 

Suppose a pane of glass should begin to glory in its 
knots and wrinkles, taking them for ornaments because 
they rendered it conspicuous, how we should laugh ! 
What knots and blemishes are in glass, that is self-con- 
sciousness in a church. 



202 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



Anything but exhortations : stupid people exhorting 
stupid people — for the most part nothing but religious 
rattle. 

As the boy listens to the wind and rejoices in the 
thoughts that the next morning he shall find beautiful 
ripe apples shaken off the tree at the back of his father's 
house, so the preacher often knows that fruit falls as he 
opens the Scriptures. 

The schoolmaster stands nearer to the work of God 
in the world and in our age than even the minister. 

That is the best church which makes the best men. 
The apostolic sects are those that make the most Apos- 
tles. Churches are to be judged by the wares they turn 
out. 

Singing even more than prayer makes the souls of a 
congregation one. 

It is the office of the Church to teach, not to train. 

Human life is that great school where men reduce to 
practice the teachings of the churches. 

Many churches are like conservatories in which the 
members are like a flower in a flower-pot — little sticks 
keep it in a particular position. 

No church can be prospered in which all the minis- 
tration comes from the pulpit. The pulpit was never 
meant to be a substitute for the living experience of the 
Church. 

The Church is not a cloister, nor are her members 
recluses. Religion is not a nun sable with gloomy vest- 
ments. 



The Church. 



203 



That sect is best that makes the greatest number of 
men of the best sort. 

Some say that, when once a man is in the right 
church, and is properly ticketed and labeled, he is like 
an express package, that will either go through or else be 
settled for by the company. 

Attempt to be aristocratic in the Church, and the 
Church dies. 

People go to church to be told how to be the saint ; 
they go into the world to be it. 

Those who have joined the Church ought to be found 
by their companions to have become more mellow, more 
rich-hearted, more generous, more manly, more pleasant 
as associates. 

A dead church with a liturgy on the top of it is like 
a sand desert covered with artificial bouquets. There 
are no roots for the flowers, no soil for roots. 

A church has a right to the gifts of every one of its 
members, and the minister is set to disclose and develop 
them. 

Ministers are fishers of men. A minister is an in- 
spirer and driller of men. He is a power-producer. 

Central among the ways of giving Christian truth to 
the people, and the fountain and motive-power of all 
other ways, is the regular and organized Church. 

The preaching of mere sentiment may polish enamel 
already smooth, but such preaching never did and never 
will get hold of the community much. 



204 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 

The Church has a right to edify itself by the gifts of 
all its members. Nothing is more striking than the 
latent and undeveloped power in the Church to-day. 

We shall never have full power-preaching so long as 
we depend on professional ministers. For they bear the 
same relation to the whole Church that the superior 
officers in the army do to the whole army. 

Nobody is called to preach unless somebody is called 
to hear him. 

In meetings, those accustomed to speak, emotive and 
imaginative persons, persons that are excitable, do the 
talking, whereas, the man of thought, who is a granary 
full of corn, never opens his mouth. 

The ministry as a profession contribute more able 
men to the learned professions than any other profession, 
and bring up their families, on the whole, with more 
culture than any other. 

To preach the gospel to the masses of mankind after 
a solid basis of truth, an inflammatory form of truth is 
needed, which takes hold of men through the imagina- 
tion. 

Whatever pleasures there may be in worldly pursuits, 
there is no pleasure in them to be compared with that 
which is derived from preaching the gospel to men, sim- 
ply and fearlessly, for the love of it. 

If the Church on earth were full of happiness- 
makers, there would be no need of further argument for 
religion. 

Churches are good for what they do, and not a bit 
more. 



The Church. 



205 



Churches whose members rattle in them almost as 
the dry bones do in the coffins of the charnel-house, are 
arguments of infidelity. 

Many churches are like nurserymen's catalogues. 
They contain an enormous number of names, but the 
fruits which they represent, when you get them and taste 
them, are of very little value. 

A church without a lineage, like the Moravian Church, 
if it has achieved the reputation of turning out the 
noblest and the best men, has priority over every other 
church. 

It has been thought to be the business of priests to 
take the consciences of men and knead them like so 
much dough into church biscuit. 

There are men of the sweetest life and purest charac- 
ter, really in communion with God, who stand outside of 
the Church, because they think they have not complied 
with the conditions of conversion. 

The biographies of good men give us nothing but the 
cream; the cream is skimmed and churned to butter, 
which is made up into charming rolls with the stamp of 
the church on them. 

No man comes into the Church on the ground that he 
is perfect, so that we can afford to paint his portrait, and 
hang it up in the gallery of the saints, but that he is im- 
perfect. 

The heresy-hunters, the Nimrod ministers in the 
Church, always carry a rifle — a spiritual rifle — under their 
arm. 

18 



206 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

He that does not know how wisely to meddle with 
public affairs in preaching the gospel, does not know how 
to preach the gospel. 

The attempt to include in the ecclesiastical bonds 
of the Church all moral instrumentalities, is against the 
order of Divine Providence, and against possibilities. 

Those who go to constitute the bodies of the churches 
are men that are already beyond the average of moral 
culture and moral feeling. 

There must be vitality, elasticity, variety, and liberty 
in church-life, or it will fail for the most part in the great 
ends for which it was established. 

There are some churches that may be called passen- 
ger-carrying churches. All that is required of them, 
they think, is to take people off from earth and land 
them in heaven just as they find them here, or not par- 
ticularly altered. 

The men that ought to preach should be ordained in 
birth. 

The laying on of hands can not make an empty head 
full, nor a cold heart warm, nor a silent nature vocal. 

Pulpits are queer places — candlesticks whose candles 
won't burn — learned men, but can not speak ; like deep 
wells and a pump that will not fetch water. 



Love. 



207 



LOVE. 

Ever since the time of Christ, the divine Helmsman 
has been steering the world straight toward the light- 
house of Love. 

Love in this world is like a seed taken from the 
tropics and planted where the winter comes too soon. 
Care for the root now, and God will take care for the 
top by-and-by. 

Love is God's loaf; and this is that feeding for 
which we are taught to pray, " Give us this day our daily 
bread." 

Where there is love in the heart, there are rainbows 
in the eyes, which cover every black cloud with gorgeous 
hues. 

God's law of love which the Jews had made stone, 
was smitten by Christ, and made to gush with water for 
the poor that lay athirst and gasping in the dust. 

He governs whom love makes serviceable. The strong 
are few, the weak are many ; and God appoints the strong 
to serve the weak. 

Loving is like music. Some instruments can go up 
two octaves, some four, and some all the way from black 
thunder to sharp lightning. 

Of all earthly music, that which reaches the farthest 
into heaven is the beating of a loving heart. 

There is no tyranny more intolerable than a con- 
science unrestrained by love. Like an ill-loaded gun, it 
recoils at the breach, and kills at the muzzle. 



2o8 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



Love is more just than justice ; compassion will cure 
more sins than condemnation. 

Love is the seraph, and faith and hope are but the 
wings by which it flies. 

When God measures men in the next world, he will 
not put the tape about their head , he will put it about 
their heart. 

Love can not endure indifference. It needs to be 
wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil 
of another's heart, or its flame burns low. 

The nature of the highest love is to be exquisitely- 
sensitive to the act of forcing itself unbidden and unwel- 
come upon another. The finer, the stronger, the higher 
love is, the more it is conditioned upon reciprocation. 

Grief is near-sighted, and holds its trouble close up ; 
but love is long-sighted, and looks at them in all points 
of view. 

The heart is the alabaster box of precious ointment, 
and, whatever its affections touch, they fill with undying 
fragrance. 

No man can afford to invest his being in anything 
lower than faith, hope, love — these three, the greatest of 
which is love. 

Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the 
world is to be cured of sin. 

As Moses was adopted by the king's daughter, so is 
toleration by love. It is faith in the truth of God, and 
born of hope, nursed by courage, and adopted by love. 



Love, 



209 



Unity is not in government nor in creeds, but in faith, 
and hope, and love. 

You never can sing so sweetly that the lion will let 
you take the lamb from his paws. 

Never work with a sense of responsibility; it is a 
miserable foundation for any man, and one which will 
never sustain him. Love is the principle on which God 
intended we should work. 

Love must come down. The little pulp-brained in- 
fant that knows nothing and feels nothing is the mon- 
arch of the household — the father and the mother are its 
two servants. 

True love pivots on honor and respect — both self- 
respect and respect for another. 

The heart is the same, whether under one or under 
another garment. 

The father and the child are not enemies because 
they are at the two ends of the whip. The whip is held 
by the heart at one end, and is meant to reach the heart 
at the other end. 

Love is the wine of existence. When you have taken 
that, you have taken the most precious drop that there 
is in the cluster. 

The sweetest life that a man can live is that which is 
keyed to love toward God and love toward man. 

Justice, like a comet, sweeps away from the sun ; but 
love, like that comet reclaimed and turned, shoots right 
toward it. 



210 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

Young love is a flame, but the love of the older and 
disciplined heart is as coals, deep, burning, unquench- 
able. 

The life of love is better than the mere emotion of 
love. 

Force and penalty are sent out by God's love, and 
are but its hands. Justice and indignation are but so 
many surgeon-hands of love. 

Love that has no fear of God is always false and 
weak. 

Love militant through all time and love triumphant 
through all eternity make two magnificent pictures. 

Power may be venerable and wisdom may be admi- 
rable, but only affection is lovable. 

Love without any conscience is namby-pamby. True 
love has in it the noblest sense of character out of a pure 
heart. 

The love-work of God throughout the universe is the 
production of love. 

Love is just. It is its nature to be just, to be true. 

All other feelings write their memories upon glass 
with crayons. Love writes upon crystal with a diamond. 
For of all the heart's powers, this alone is sovereign, and, 
being sovereign, God has crowned it with immortality. 

In friendship your heart is like a bell struck every 
time your friend is in trouble. 

There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent 
for the child. 



Love. 



211 



Often the glory of the gift is that it is so given that 
there can be no return. It is helping one at our own ex- 
pense that marks friendship. 

There are many acerb, hard-faced, rough, severe 
men, who, though they will hew you with their tongue, 
will serve you ten times as much as many waxy-cheeked, 
good-natured, abdominal men. 

Love is encyclopedic. Everybody who knows how 
to love will find out through love everything else. 

Love is a quiver that has a hundred arrows in it. 
Sometimes it acts by pleasure and sometimes by pain. 
Out of love come truth and justice. 

Magnetized and colored by affection, reason becomes 
intuitive, and is almost a certain teacher. 

Nothing goes far which has not the wings of love to 
make it buoyant, so that it can fly. 

What an ear of corn is without the grain, that Chris- 
tianity is without kind, genial, sympathetic love. 

We take a fish, and before we eat it we scale it, and 
dress it, and keep that which is good, and throw away 
that which is bad ; and so we have to take our friends. 
He who does not know how to take them thus, but has 
to swallow them whole or to throw them away entirely, is 
to be pitied. 

In the New Testament the word "love " constantly 
rings out its sweet, silvery notes, like a bell in some bel- 
fry, piercing through all other sounds. " Love " swings 
in the eternal belfry, and may be heard through all 
earthly noises. 



212 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



Love is itself a perfect thing ; no other feeling is. 

No man can tell another his faults so as to benefit 
him, unless he loves him. 

No human heart is ever cured until you can find 
another heart to brood it ; for the cure of the heart is of 
the heart, and a loving heart cures an unloving heart. 

There is but one single faculty in the whole roll of 
the soul's faculties to which every one in the nature of 
man consents to be obedient. This is the faculty of 
Love. 

There is no passion, there is no appetite, there is no 
force which when brought into the presence of love, in 
its beauty and strength, has the instinct of rebellion in 
it. Everything bows down to that. 



TROUBLE. 

God washes the eyes by tears until they can behold 
the invisible land where tears shall come no more. 

Half the troubles for which men go slouching in 
prayer to God are caused by their intolerable pride. 
We let our blessings grow moldy, and then call them 
curses. 

A helping word to one in trouble is often like a 
switch on a railroad-track — but one inch between wreck 
and smooth-rolling prosperity. 



Trouble. 



213 



When God sends storms upon men they must imitate 
the humble grass, which saves itself by lying down. It 
is better to lie down than to break down. 

Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions 
us for better things. God Almighty casts a man down 
when he wants to chisel him, and the chiseling is always 
to make him something finer and better than before. 

Many men are water-logged with anxiety, and, instead 
of quickening them, it only paralyzes exertion. 

We march in life like so many soldiers, but march to 
a requiem, not to a pasan ; and the sounds that fill the 
world are sounds of mourning and of sorrow. 

Like the emery and sand with which we scour off 
rude surfaces, evil and trouble in this world are but in- 
struments. And they are in the hands of God. 

Sorrows bring us closer to God than joys, usually ; 
but sorrows to be of use must be borne, as Christ's were, 
victoriously, carrying with them sacred prophecies to 
the heart of Hope. 

Men are gold in the rock, and God plays miner and 
blasts them out of the rock ; and then he plays stamper 
and crushes them ; and then he plays smelter and melts 
them ; and then they are gold free from the rock by the 
grace of God's severity to them. 

Troubles are God's love-letters, written in dark ink. 

God rolls men in his snows, and feeds them with his 
coarsest food, and clothes them in the coarsest raiment, 
and beats them as a flail beats grain till the straw is 
gone and the wheat is left. 



214 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 



Men nurse their cares, and seem as uneasy without 
some fret as an old friar would be without his hair- 
girdle. 

Many of our troubles are God dragging us, and they 
would end if we would stand upon our feet and go 
whither he would have us. 

As, in the great cycle of the year, frost and dew are 
the same thing, and come with a like merciful errand, so 
is the Divine presence in the midst of great sorrows. 

No one has a right to convert the outlying future 
into a storm-ground, and draw in upon himself its chills 

and blasts. 

Knighted are we, not by the touch of any soldier, or 
king, or prince. Trouble it is that lays its sword on 
men's shoulders, and says, " Rise up, Sir Knight." 

Sorrow is the fire, and troubles are the coursers by 
which men are drawn in the naming chariot heaven- 
ward. 

Suffering is God's regent in the universe, saying, 
" The way is a way of pleasantness, and all its paths are 
peace " ; and therefore, when we suffer, it is because we 
are out of the way. 

You might as well ask what is the origin of a man's 
suffering when he is learning to drive nails and hits his 
thumb instead of the nail, as to ask what is the origin 
of evil. He does not know how to strike straight — that 
is the origin of it. 

No man is appointed to pass through this life as if it 
were plague-stricken and infectious. 



Trouble. 



215 



We are in this world to be fashioned by its grinding. 

There is but one way out of suffering, and that way 
is upward. The golden gate that leads into the paths 
which are peace is an upward gate. The nearer God, 
the less earth can afflict. 

God makes the life fertile by disappointments, as he 
makes the ground fertile by frosts. 

It is fear, nay, it is sentient suffering, that infuses our 
very earliest ideas, and precedes all ideas. Beginning 
at the lowest point we have to work our way gradually 
up through the social and spiritual element. 

Many persons take their troubles by the imagination. 

Anxiety in human life is what squeaking and grind- 
ing are in machinery that is not oiled. In life trust is 
the oil. 

As the sea-captain's child trusts his father in the 
storm, so we need trust God in troubles. 

Those things in the past which have seemed the most 
disastrous have been the most prolific of good. 

"Let your conversation be without covetousness." 
Do not fidget, and worry, and vex yourself about how 
the ends are going to meet. You may be sure they al- 
ways will meet. 

Grief is beautiful, as in winter ice-clad trees are 
beautiful when the sun shines upon them, but it is dan- 
gerous. Ice breaks many a branch, and so many per- 
sons are bowed down and crushed by their afflictions. 

Some sins, like asps, always carry their sting with 
them. 



216 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



A tear dropped in the silence of a sick-chamber 
often rings in heaven with a sound which belongs not to 
earthly trumpet or bells. 

Pain is like emery. If it scours anything that wants 
to be scoured, it is good ; otherwise, it is not good. 

Troubles are God's rains in this world. Irritations, 
rude convulsions, rough experiences, are the means by 
which God is preparing a moral soil for the future. 

True suffering is the labor-pain of joy. 

Suffering is as God's letter. Open it and read it. 
Many a one will find that he is titled, or that there is an 
inheritance laid up for him. 

Two thirds of all the disappointments of life are not 
sent by a special Providence. Men butt against them. 

Pain and suffering are, in the actual experience of 
this world, regulative, disciplinary, and formative. They 
are not accidental. 

Our virtues are like crystals hidden in rocks. No 
man shall find them by any soft ways, but by the ham- 
mer and by fire. 

There are no troubles which have such a wasting and 
disastrous effect upon the mind as those which must 
not be told. 

Pain is God's midwife, that helps some virtue into 
existence, or some noble trait into a true living. 

Many are water-logged by fear or anxiety, and sink. 

It is by trouble that God puts temper into the heart. 



Trouble. 



217 



Evidences are numerous of the design of Providence 
to pound us. We must feel the mallet and the saw, the 
punch and the bore. God is making something of us. 

Do not imagine trouble ; do not borrow it ; do not 
die before your time. When God wants you to die, he 
will show you how to do it easily. 

God's promises were first made to men in the most 
bitter trials. They are not summer promises. 

A radiant heart lets forth its hope upon its sorrow, 
and all the blackness flies. 

God girded men with promises which held them up 
when their good name was shot at. The men have 
died, but their charmed girdles are left. God's armory 
is full of them. 

Troubles come to us like mire and filth ; but, when 
mingled with the soil, they change to flower and fruit. 

Many troubles can be cut at the root and cease. 
Many can be strangled. Many can be overcome by 
direct attack. 

No man goes unbaptized in the waters of affliction. 
Where the Jordan flows in just above the Dead Sea, the 
waters we all are baptized in are bitter with the taste of 
sorrow and trouble. 

There is such a thing as carrying one's self so that 
there shall be hardly any trouble or annoyances. 

When we dig a man out of trouble, the hole that he 
leaves behind him is the grave where we bury our own 
trouble. 

19 



218 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

The things which men bear here are mere dust on 
the car that is speeding them to their bridal. 

There is nothing so hardening as unspiritualized 
suffering. 

No man ever grows to a full man's estate without the 
ministration of suffering. 

The marvelous economy of earthly suffering, rightly 
understood, is an economy of cleansing and of beautify- 
ing. 

We are born to suffering, if you call sorrow and 
trouble suffering. We are born to the anvil, and to the 
blows that shall shape us on the anvil. 

Happiness in the world is universal ; sorrow is ex- 
ceptional. 

God's mercies come more frequently in the form of 
sufferings than in the form of joys. God sends his cross 
to men to develop their essential manhood. 

It is a bad thing for a man to talk too much about 
his cares to anybody. Cares are very much like pim- 
ples : if you let them alone, they will dry up and dis- 
appear. 

When once a man is set free from an unwholesome 
subordination to pride and vanity, more than half the 
cares that now chafe him like emery, and more than 
half the troubles that now beat upon him and annoy 
him, are subdued. 

Nothing is half so medicinal for our troubles as 
benevolent sympathy and occupation in the troubles of 
others. 



Trouble. 



219 



As the storm-cloud draws its materials from the sea, 
so the great storm that lowers and pelts on men's heads 
mercilessly in this world draws its materials from the 
Dead Sea of the body. 

Nothing strikes all value out of the ordinary affairs 
of life so soon as sorrow. 

The suffering of a great nature, if borne silently and 
uncomplainingly, is irresistibly affecting. 

Sorrows are gardeners : they plant flowers along 
waste places, and teach vines to cover barren heaps. 

There is nothing which makes the world so empty, 
and so quickly empty, as great troubles when they befall 
men. 

Trouble teaches men how much there is in man- 
hood. 

Tears are the alphabet by which God teaches us 
many and many a truth of wisdom that no book of 
philosophy gives us. 

He who has by trouble been taught what manhood 
is, has his own strong castle, his own defense ; and he 
can walk in the midst of life contented and happy, 
though he be frowned upon. 

No men need the touch of trouble more than men 
who are greatly prospered in outward things. 

Prosperity is good ; but, to those who can stand it, 
adversity is better. God has revealed the wisdom of 
the heavenly world oftener to men in dungeons than 
to men in palaces. 



220 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit 

TEMPTATION. 

Temptations are enemies outside the castle seeking 
entrance. If there be no false retainer within who holds 
treacherous parley, there can scarcely be even an offer. 

A tempest seems to the beat of an eagle's strong wing 
to be but a zephyr. His strength of wing measures the 
power of the wind. When a man is unresisting, the least 
temptations become mighty, and fill the whole heaven. 

Difficulties are God's errands. And when we are 
sent upon them we should esteem it a proof of God's 
confidence — as a compliment from God, 

Temptation never works out anything. It merely 
gives impulse, suggestion, stimulus. If any evil is wrought 
out through us, we work it out wholly and absolutely. 
Temptation goes with the strongest faculties. 

Temptations go along turnpikes in the human soul. 
They go where broad passions are, where broad tracks 
of power lie. They run with the strongest faculties, the 
strongest appetites, the strongest habits. 

No man knows what he will do till the right temp- 
tation comes. 

Many a man has been dined out of his religion, and 
his politics, and his manhood, almost. 

Mountains of gold would not seduce some men, yet 
flattery would break them down. 

All men are tempted. There is no man that lives 
that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temp- 
tation, put in the right spot. 



Temptation, 



221 



We can conceive of nothing done by a spirit in the 
way of malignant temptation that is worse than that 
which we see every day among living men. 

It is not when the cable lies coiled up on the deck 
that you know how strong or how weak it is ; it is when 
it is put to the test. 

Temptation shoots with a strong bow, but with a short 
arrow ; and if you fly on a level the archer will hit you 
every time, while if you fly high he can not hit you. 

Find out what your temptations are, and you will 
find out largely what you are yourself. 

Ninety-five per cent of all the men who go down 
under temptation to an unlawful death, are men who 
were by nature generous, incautious, frank, genial, 
kindly. 

Every man has had his battle with temptations. 
Every man has had his scars. 

Men should deal with themselves as they do who 
carry dynamite to and fro. A man who is laden with 
explosive materials does not go into foundries and black- 
smith-shops. He does not resort to places where sparks 
are flying abroad. 

Men are all temptable, but they are not on that ac- 
count all contemptible. 



222 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 



DEATH. 

Indigestion, and its train of horrors ; neuralgia, and 
its warp and woof of fiery threads ; rheumatism, and 
many other ills that are common to man, are a hundred- 
fold harder to bear than dying. 

It may be said, generally, that life suffers, and death 
soothes. 

It is not very hard for a man to die, if he is built 
right — a great many men would rather die than give up. 

It is ten thousand times harder to live right than to 
die right. 

Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit 
may swell. 

When men are death-struck, they are death-called ; 
and when men are death-called, they are God-called ; 
and when they are God-called, they are Christ-found, if 
Christ's people. 

Nowhere is there so sweet a prospect as where a 
soul, in its early years, is flying away out of life, and out 
of time, through the gate of death — the rosy gate of 
death ; the royal gate of death ; the golden gate of 
death ; the pearly gate of death. 

Death is not an end. It is a new impulse. We are 
discharged out of this life, where we have been like 
arrows in a quiver. 

If dying is translation ; if, passing from sentience here, 
we reach a higher sentience in the world beyond, one 
can almost bear anything in this life. 



Persons and Systems. 



223 



The opening of the pearly gate — that is death. Going 
out into life — that is dying. Christ is the door out of life. 

Death is represented in the New Testament as falling 
asleep in Jesus, and as going home. 

Death is no slamming door of darkness, behind which 
sprites gibber to frighten men. Death is not weakness : 
it is the horseman of God coming for God's elect. 

The grave has a pearly gate. The grave has no dark- 
ness. In the grave God has set his lens, and through it, 
as through a telescope, we look to behold the future, and 
we behold the celestial city. 



PERSONS AND SYSTEMS. 

The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets 
than by the wisest statesmen. 

When God made the Puritans he made them as we 
make swords, taking them through fire and water ; and 
they were the swords of God. When men pulled them 
out of their scabbards they wished they could push them 
back again. 

Girard slipped through into immortality, and will be 
remembered, because he took money out of his own 
pocket and put it into the public veins. He that works 
for God's great scheme of benevolence shall not be for- 
gotten. 



224 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

The essential idea of Puritanism is God, everlasting, 
sovereign, immutable, eternal ;. God glorious in holiness 
and fearful in praises. It gives breadth to the conception 
of the individual, and always goes toward liberty. 

Many and many a man has died leaving millions and 
millions of money, who has not conferred upon society 
one tithe of the blessing which has been conferred upon 
it by Howe of the sewing-machine. 

Jennie Deans in Walter Scott's novel is worth more 
than all the characters put together of many more fash- 
ionable novels. There is more heroic power in that 
simple character, in " The Heart of Mid-Lothian," than 
in many a moral treatise, and many a system of moral 
philosophy. 

Goethe was an incarnation of refined selfishness. 

Calvinism intensifies, beyond all example, the indi- 
viduality of man, and shows in an overpowering light his 
responsibility to God ; hence those who hold it have been 
the stanchest defenders of freedom. 

Other systems leave men soft and dirty. Calvinism 
makes them of white marble, to endure forever. 

There never was a Michael Angelo nor a Raphael 
who did not go through drill. 

Nowhere on the globe do men live so well as in 
America, or grumble so much. 

A man may be put at a point where — as Napoleon was, 
or Wellington in Spain, or Sir John Moore in the north 
of Portugal, or Clive in India — he can make a special 
providence for a nation, for a race, for an age, for one 
land, or for the globe. 



Persons and Systems, 



225 



Dickens's books, though they are not theological or 
religious, are books which are in strange and admirable 
harmony with the message, " Good- will to men." 

All the sounds will have died out of the sea before 
the hymns of Watts, and Doddridge, and Wesley will 
cease their carols and their singings. 

To be like Howe, inventing the sewing-machine, a 
benefactor of one's kind, is to be like God. 

Better to have written one of Charles Wesley's hymns 
than to have built the proudest monument in Egypt, or 
to have produced the noblest statue that the world ever 
saw. 

Voltaire was more Christian, with all his scoffing, 
than were the so-called Christians of his age, as they 
were represented by a despotic and bloody-footed priest- 
hood. 

Paul was the imperial apostle. The nation from 
which he sprang was the imperial nation. Empire was 
its reigning idea. Through his whole life the genius of 
the apostle was that of a general launching forth to take 
possession of the world. 

The interior villages of New England are her brood- 
combs. 

In New England the good are very good and the bad 
are very bad. 

Some critics, and for that matter most of them, I 
fear, rejoice in faults as buzzards do in carrion, to feed 
upon it ; but a true critic is a surgeon, who cuts away 
the wen, or imposthume, that he may rejoice in the 
cleanness of a body restored to health. 



226 Proverbs from PlymotUh Pulpit, 



MISCELLANEOUS. 

The greatest forces are made up of units of weak- 
ness. A locust, a rat, a worm, an insect, simply by in- 
crease, is more powerful against skill, science, and every 
enginery, than the lightning or the floods of the sea. 

Some lectures are like a pomological show, fine in the 
exhibition, and very juicy and refreshing afterward. 

To gormandize books is as wicked as to gormandize 
food. You have no more right to be a literary epicure 
than to be a physical epicure. 

The most cf everything is that which is unexpressed. 

There are flint words which, being struck, flash forth 
with a hundred sparks of association. 

To represent heaven, whatever is most resplendent 
on earth must be gathered. 

Nothing in this world requires such long seasoning 
and ripening as new thoughts. 

The best things are the things never written. 

A book is good company. It is full of conversation 
without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full 
instruction, but pursues you never. 

A money-miser is bad enough. A picture-miser, a 
book-miser is yet more abject. 

The literature of the globe to-day is humane, at least, 
if it is not spiritual. 

The mystery of history is an insoluble problem. 



Miscellaneous. 



227 



The ideal is the glory of the world. It is the morn- 
ing-star that tempts men on. Without it the race stag- 
nates, and the world is a pestilent, miasmatic swamp. 

What is easy to men of genius becomes fatal to men 
who are without genius. 

That which distinguishes man from the brute is his 
power, in dealing with Nature, to milk her laws, and make 
them give forth their bounty. 

Obedience to law is the method by which our facul- 
ties are quick in their just action ; and true obedience is 
true liberty. 

There are three schoolmasters for everybody that 
will employ them — the senses, intelligent companions, 
and books. 

To read, to write, and to cipher do not make knowl- 
edge any more than a horse is a journey. It is that on 
which you make your journey — that is all. 

There are two things that can not be rubbed out, and 
these are the natural superiority of one man over others, 
and the acquired superiority of true culture. Education 
and distinction in this country are going together. 

In all material things, the more sincere you are the 
better, but the more sincere you are if you are wrong, 
the worse. In the latter case, sincerity is the mallet that 
drives home the mischief. 

The choice must be made between the brain and the 
stomach ; the two together can not be populous. If the 
one is filled, the other must be relieved. To work the 
head, temperance must be carried into the diet. 



228 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 



Health and happiness are like a generous hickory-fire 
— a bank of coals with considerable flame on the top. 

A stolid and selfish man absorbs his pleasure, while a 
generous nature, like a bell, rings his out. 

Ascription of praise to God is the utterance of the 
joy and gladness which the divine excellence tends to 
excite in us, and may be called a caress of words. 

If you collect all the aches of any man during one 
year, they amount to positive pain enough to kill him 
fifty times over. 

There never was a person that did anything worth 
doing, who did not really receive more than he gave. 

No person ever watched with the sick, sympathized 
with the sorrowing, or carried burdens and bore cares 
for other people, who would not say, " The happiness 
that it gave me more than repaid me for all my trouble." 

When a man pays his debts, he preaches in a lan- 
guage that is understood by more men than when he 
preaches in almost any other language that is spoken. 

Mirth is the sweet wine of human life. It should be 
offered sparkling with zestful life unto God. 

A woman's pity often opens the door to love. 

To inherit a sound constitution, a mind of good 
quality and inclining to moral and intellectual pursuits, 
a disposition elastic and cheery — surely, this is to be 
born to fortune. 

The best of all company for a thoughtful man is good 
health within and solitude without. 



Miscellaneous. 229 
There is an army of waiters in this world. 

To know that one has a secret is to know half the 
secret itself. 

The one great poem of New England is her Sunday. 

Chickering's grandest grand piano, with a fool play- 
ing jigs on it, is not so good as an old harpsichord, with 
Beethoven at the keys. 

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints 
his own nature into his pictures. 

If you carry a torch for yourself, you can not keep 
the light out of other people's eyes. 

What clouds of needless prayers are daily floated up- 
ward, which never distill in rain ! 

In things of the heart, our knowledge is as a little 
child lying in a skiff upon the ocean, seeing only the 
sides of the pretty boat, but nothing of the great, under- 
lying sea that heaves it. 

The shells which the sea rolls out on shore are not 
its best. The pearls have to be dived for. 

The passions need the rein and curb, but moral sen- 
timents need the spur. 

Next to ingratitude, the most painful thing to bear is 
gratitude. 

The gate of heaven, as St. John saw it, was a pearl ; 

but, as I see it, it is a mother's heart. Through that the 

angels of God ascend and descend perpetually. 
20 



230 Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. 

Content and discontent should run in and out of 
each other in every true man's life. Every man should 
have a generous discontent with what he has attained, 
and strive to go upward ; and yet every one should be 
so much the master of himself as to refuse to be dis- 
quieted by his environments. 



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